Jamie Gans Interview Narrator: Jamie Gans Interviewer: Dáithí Sproule Date: 7 May, 2018 DS: Dáithí Sproule JG: Jamie Gans [BEGIN JAMIE GANS PART 01—filename: A1012a_EML_mmtc] DS: I am here with Jamie Gans, my old friend Jamie Gans, in our house on Cherokee Avenue, and Jamie has come to town to do a concert with me and other people last night at the Celtic Junction and to do this interview. This must be May the 7th, because the gig was May the 6th. I start everybody chronologically, so that’s what I’m going to do with you, Jamie. I’m going to act as if I don’t know as much about you as I do. Could you tell me, where were you born and raised? JG: I was born in New Jersey. Do you need a specific place? DS: I need details…yea, it would be nice… JG: Well, I was born in a town that I never knew. It was a favorite doctor of my mother’s – she always told me it was this town called Plainfield, New Jersey, which I have never been to since 1952 when I came out of my mother’s stomach. But I did grow up in a rural part of New Jersey, which is no longer rural, from the 1950s till the late 60s. DS: What is the background of your parents? JG: My father grew up in Milwaukee, although his mother was from New York, so they eventually moved back to New York City. His dad was a businessman in Milwaukee in the 1920s, 30s, and I never knew him because he passed away in 1950. And my mother’s side goes back to some of the earliest settlements in the northeastern part of the United States, or North America, I should say. 1 DS: What’s her surname? JG: Her dad’s name was Gould and her mother’s name was Laval. Gould was an old English name because it goes back to a minister who came over, John Gould, in the early 1600s. Her mother’s side was Labaw and Adair, which is my middle name and her first name. DS: How to you spell Labaw? JG: It was changed from – well, I’m not sure what the original spelling was -- LeBeau – but it changed to Labaw. So Labaw was her paternal side and her maternal side was Adair. And my middle name is Adair. I was hoping it was our Irish connection, but Adair is apparently a lowland Scottish name, which I found out. But there are some Adairs that moved to Ireland. DS: Of course, like the Sproules – the same thing. JG: As far as I know from my genealogical research, that’s about the only thing, I’ve got to have some bit of Irish. DS: Well, it’s funny, in talking to other people and also in talking to Brian Miller about this project, one of the themes that emerges – it’s probably not surprising – is Irishness or how people felt about playing Irish music. I suppose it’s particularly interesting if the people don’t have any connection with Ireland. It’s a bit early in the chat to talk about it, but, since you mentioned it, once you started playing Irish music, did you think about that, the business of – “Is it funny me playing Irish music when I’m not Irish?” Did any of those issues arise, or did people confront you and say, “Well, you’re not Irish”? JG: Well, that’s true. The time that I got into Irish music, I was experimenting around. Well, of course, I don’t know if you want me to go back, but I started, and you might have done this too, in the late 50s or early 60s, I was starting to get into the movement of the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five and all that, and I wanted to play the drums and so forth. So I was into that, and then somehow I got pulled in through different avenues – like, I was interested in old jazz music, I wanted to find a way… DS: 20s, 30s? JG: Yea. My dad earned a lot of money, so he sent me to a private school. I was in a boarding school in Connecticut. 2 DS: That’s from the age of what? What age? JG: High school age, which is ninth through twelfth grade. Everybody liked the British movement of rock music, and then there was some other great rock music on this side of the Atlantic. I was interested in that, but, somehow, I don’t know how I got interested in things like Jelly Roll Morton and that type of jazz – early – I can’t think of all the jazz things. But in those days RCA put out these RCA Vintage albums of those artists – early black jazz music. I loved it. But when I say this, I actually think the RCA Vintage also put out early bluegrass music, and I purchased that probably. And through that, the connection, I was attracted to that too. When everybody pretty much had their blinders on, only listening to one style of rock music, I was getting interested in all sorts of different musics, including Indian music, like Ravi Shankar – of course, the Beatles pulled that in too. DS: This is when you were in boarding school? So how were you hearing it? Were you hearing these various musics on the radio? JG: In those days people had tons of LPs. That’s the thing unfortunately I can’t remember – what pulled me into that. Maybe I’ll have a dream some night – if I remember, I’ll tell you. DS: I suppose you’re talking about fourteenish? JG: I’m thinking aged sixteen. At fourteen I was in eighth grade, because they put me back in third grade. Fifteen through eighteen… DS: We touch base with certain things with everybody. One of them is, did you have any formal musical education, say, before that, and up to that? And the other one to remember to mention is, were your parents actively interested in, or your brothers and sisters, interested in any form of live music, singing around the house, playing, going to concerts? JG: Yea, my mother, who has been a visual artist up until about two years ago – she’s ninety five, now she’s in assisted living -- but before that she was teaching beautiful painting. So it influenced us all, and we all thought we were going to be visual artists, all my siblings and I. I started drawing on our wallpaper, which was not acceptable, but visual art was my first expression and I loved it through I majored in college. But somehow the music was really deep in my heart, and I had to go with it. The only connection I remember was, my mother’s mother was a really good piano player. I would stay over with her, and I would hear her playing, and she 3 would still be playing these pop songs from the 1920s, which I knew nothing about at the time, and then some small classical stuff. Then her husband, my grandfather, was also a piano player, but he played less. So that was the musical side. But they weren’t interested in any necessarily cultural music, you know. I think of myself as being part of the movement at that era. I wasn’t pulled in by any specifics. DS: You weren’t studying playing an instrument at school, or choirs, or anything like that? JG: Drums – I did take drum lessons, a little minor rock. That was the true definition of a garage band. Then during my high school age I didn’t play music at all. I listened to a lot of it. But I did not play until I went to college, and that’s where what I play now was seeding. DS: Yea, the seeds were planted, yea. The business of feeding your mind with music is so important, and anybody who gets seriously involved with music, they have started that process of sucking in stuff at an early age. And probably the more variety of stuff that people have interested themselves in, the richer their music will be. Any of the great musicians in any genre that I ever read about, that’s true. JG: I just remembered this time frame. After I graduated from the boarding school, I spent a years and a half not going to college, because I was nineteen and it was during the Vietnam era, the end of it, and they were starting to draft people, and I was definitely not wanting to go be in the army, eventually go to Vietnam, so I went and visited my sister who was going to college in Ohio, called Lake Erie College. It was just a women’s college then, and she had a good friend who was from British Columbia. Her friend said, “If you want to go somewhere really beautiful in Canada, go to British Columbia.” Somebody else there said, “Jamie, I’ll take you – let’s go to British Columbia.” So I went there, and that was actually my first musical… I started playing guitar there. That was really good because they were playing kind of jug band music in this south central part of British Columbia. And there were some American young folks that moved there because they had been drafted, and the rest of them of course were from that area.