Alan Jesperson and Rod Bellville Narrators Phil Nusbaum Interviewer March 24, 2010 PN: Phil Nusbaum RB: Rod Bellville AJ: Alan Jesperson PN: Rod Bellville is here. I’m Phil Nusbaum. Alan Jesperson. Rod and Alan are going to tell us about Bluegrass in Minnesota, and that is what this is for. This could be used as a resource for some article someone might write at some time. The logical place for this would be Inside Bluegrass, or could be any magazine. This is a primary document we’re creating, so, thanks for coming, and thanks for hosting. I’d like to get how you came into Bluegrass, first off, and when it was, and some of the particulars. Rod, would you like to go first, since Alan is pointing to you? RB: I had a radio with a little light in it and a little box. It had a little wire that went up to, I don’t know where it went up to a little, something, so you could get reception. You could turn it on and hear a little bzzz bzzz, and then you could finally get Gene Autry at night. PN: When were you born and where? RB: 1951 or 2 or something…oh, I don’t know. I think I was born in Minneapolis in 1944. My folks were from Milwaukee, but somehow they came here just before I was born or what. PN: Maybe they wanted you to be born in Minnesota for citizenship purposes. RB: No. I think it probably had something to do with my dad’s residency or something. His medical school thing was winding up. But any ways, so, Gene Autry would come on and then they would sing and do that, and I thought, “Oh, that’s so swell.” So, about 1954 I went to Florida or so, and drove through Country music territory. PN: So, you were about 10 years old at this point? RB: ‘54, yeah. And we got to hear Country music comin’ out of the radio in the car ‘cause it was all over the place. And much to my folks’ dismay, I thought, God, this is just, with the combination of Gene Autry, and then actually getting into the country…and I can remember going on a trip with them one summer through Montana and I was sayin’, “Look at them cows!” and they’d say, “No, no, no! We don’t say ‘them cows.’” And I thought, “That’s what they say on the radio…” So then I started singing peculiarly, and we’d go to church and we had to sing all the time, o’course, you know. My grandfather was a minister then, so it was a big church deal. 1 PN: This was in Wisconsin? RB: No, no. This was in the Twin Cities - southeast Minneapolis. But I can remember him sayin’ when I was a little kid, “You’ve gotta stop singin’! You’re gonna wreck your voice!” [Laughing] What did I care, you know? And actually, the first time I heard Bluegrass was in 1958 or 9, some friend of mine bought the Stanley Brothers’ record with the rainbow on it that’s got, “Mother’s not dead, she’s only sleeping”…the harmony. Actually, the first time we got a Country music sampler thing, must have been ‘58 or 9 again, had Skeeter Davis and who knows, but it had one cut off Foggy Mountain Banjo. I can’t remember if it was Ground Speed or Home Sweet Home now, anymore. The banjo thing was totally captivating, so… Then just after that we got the Foggy Mountain Banjo record, actually. I’d been playing in string quartets with friends of mine. PN: This is Classical music string quartets? RB: Yeah. PN: What did you play? RB: Violin. Almost immediately, I said, “We’re not going to play this anymore; we’re gonna play Bluegrass.” I had a guitar that my dad got, when I was a little kid, my mom bought him a guitar, which he never played. It was a mahogany guitar with horrible action. It had a neck - huge, and the action... like a Dobro ‘cause it warped. So I had to play that. My friends were…actually, this was Jeff Gilkinson, now he played at the Dillards, see, after a while. He’s actually in Nashville right now; if you look him up he’s all over the place. But, his mom used to indulge him in things, and I thought, “Well, you’re the one whose mom’s gonna buy you a banjo, so you’re gonna have to be the banjo player.” But he actually had a four-string banjo that she had played in college, which would have been a long, long time ago, and he actually got where he could play three-finger style picking on a four-string banjo. PN: Wow. RB: Pretty good…sounded nice. She bought him an RV-250, which at that time cost 225 bucks, arm and a leg, you know. Then he had to relearn everything with a five string. Then the guy who played with us was another neighbor of ours, a guy named John Hay, who was a talented musician and a cello player. He started playing bass on the cello, but he also played fiddle like an old guy, with the fiddle on his elbow instead of his shoulder. So, we started out on Oak Street and Washington, actually, it was around the corner from Oak Street. PN: This is near the U [University of Minnesota]. RB: Oh, yeah. PN: How old are you at this point? 2 RB: Oh, 17, give or take. I’m just talkin’ about starting out playing jobs for money, we played all the time. We’d go in Jeff’s house, sit down and play and it’d be dark when we’d get done. We used to play those Stanley Brothers records so much that the songs we liked would turn white on the LP. I can’t remember what the name of it was, it was the coffee house that belonged to two guys; it belonged to Mel Leslie, the guy who owned the Coffee Break, which was around the comer on Oak Street. That’s the place where Bob Dylan played, and Dave Ray played there. AJ: I remember sitting there, the first time I saw Dave Ray; we went in late, to the Coffee Break, and this was a little house, and there wasn’t any room, so I had to sit up in front, and Dave Ray broke a string and the end of the string hit me in the cheek. That’s how close I was, about 25 inches away from Dave Ray… [Laughing] excuse me... RB: Anyway, me and Jeff went and played that job, then somehow we got, I don’t how we got hooked up with Annie Olsen who owned the Scholar [Scholar Coffeehouse in Dinkytown near the University of Minnesota] at that time. She’d been married to a Classical guitar player who died in a car accident. PN: Which kind of guitar player? RB: Spanish, or a Flamenco player. I think she had a famous Ramirez guitar that she sold finally. But anyway, so, we told her and she said she liked Bluegrass, so we started playing there, and we made 15 bucks a piece for Friday and Saturday. After Red Nelson bought that, Annie sold it, Red said, “You guys have gotta take a break, people want to buy stuff, you can’t just play for five hours.” So then we had to start taking breaks. AJ: This was at the Scholar? RB: This was at the Scholar in Dinkytown, where, actually, a Burger King was there, now it’s just a parking lot. It’s the parking lot next to Hollywood Video, which may have been tom down in the last while or too, I don’t know. That was a really neat place. AJ: I remember that I had tickets to see the Greenbriar Boys, and that was in ‘64, I think, maybe ‘65 - I was still in high school, I think, I graduated in ‘65. I had tickets to see the Greenbriar Boys, and they were only going to be there Friday night, and Thursday night the Scholar burned down [chuckling]. PN: Oh my goodness! AJ: Rod tells me they had a party, so I never got to see Greenbriar Boys. PN: Al, what’s your birth date? AJ: May 1947. 3 PN: Rod, what you’re describing is getting together with your friends when you first started out playing, and I wondered if you could talk a little bit about how you’d get together, I mean what kind of occasion caused that, or…? RB: We lived close together, so we just played all the time. PN: Did you call each other on the phone and say, “Hey, come on over,” or, what was it like? RB: Mostly I’d just go over to Jeff’s house and whatever he was doing he’d quit and we’d play. But then the same deal with this John Hay guy now, it just almost occurred, really, you know, it’s not like it was hard to…if there was any chance that we could go and play, that’s what we did. I mean, I don’t even know if we’d call him, or if he just somehow imagine that if it was a certain time of day he’d just show up or what...I can’t remember exactly, but, it wasn’t like it is now where you call people us and they tell you, “Well, I’ll get back to ya, or I’ll think about it...” They aren’t waiting to see if there’s a better opportunity, which is what everyone seems to do lately, you know.