One of the oddities of my life is the enduring interest people express in my long-ago musical career. I still get mail about my records, concerts, guitar pedal-capo, touring with Alex de Grassi and Michael Hedges, and so on.
It’s odd because I haven’t recorded or performed in decades. In the meantime, I’ve published seven novels, some of them best-sellers, all of them achieving greater renown than my records.
Or so I thought until this year, during which I’ve seen rising interest in my albums – even my first, Guitar, from 1973. Now Morning Trip Records, a wonderful, daring, eclectic label from Toronto, will re-release it on vinyl and digital download on December 18.
I wrote these guitar solos when I was in my late teens and early twenties, and I hadn’t heard them in decades when Morning Trip contacted me. I told them I thought my compositions back then were primitive, compared with my later albums Fireheart/Fireriver and Willow, and I’ve always said that the master was hand-carved with a hatchet. My then-wife Jean Cannon and I drew the cover art and record label by hand.
That’s what they liked about the project! I appreciate their discerning taste.
I wrote some of the pieces while living in my sister’s chicken coop, near Seymour, Wisconsin (in the paper-mill-scented plains west of Green Bay). I’d shoveled out the chicken shit and set it up with a cot, piano, electric space heater, and music stand. I fought off my sister’s goat Zeus and loneliness, and wrote about what I saw — cows, small town life, cornfields — in tunes like “The Seymour Volunteer Fire Department” (fire engines hurrying toward their rescue operation) and “Demolition Derby” (the Midwestern county fair event of cars smashing into each other until only one can move). I wrote “Black Cat Lament,” with a steel slide on my index finger, for a dear cat who up and died on me, and left me in grief.
Later, in Madison, Wisconsin, living with fellow yoga practitioners (out on Old Sauk Road, back when it was just cornfields), I wrote other tunes, a lot of them hypnotic mantras that I’d play ‘round and ‘round. I adored my little Martin 00-16’s quick response and bright treble, and I used it to compose under the direct influence of J.S. Bach, rock ‘n’ roll, John Fahey, Ragtime, traditional English folk music, Indian classical music, and hashish. It was genuine, original, funky stuff about the world, life, love, and god, as true as I could tell it.
They’re all on this wonderfully re-engineered release by Morning Trip, crisper and cleaner than the original. I thank the MT folks for their acknowledgement of this piece of regional history. Little did I know that I was among a handful of guitarists laying the foundation for what would become “American Fingerpicking Style,” or “New Age” music, or whatever labels it might later acquire.
The original “Guitar” album came into being because Louis Hardin – known as Moondog, the blind, Viking-styled composer, who had three albums out on Capitol Records and best-selling singles such as “All Is Loneliness” made famous by Janis Joplin – stayed with us on Old Sauk Road. (You can read more about Moondog on this blogsite, in my Meetings With Remarkable People series.) Hearing me play, he told me I should put out my own solo album, as he had done with his drumming.
So, yeah. I did. And the rest is history, as they say. I’m flattered, amazed, and grateful to see Guitar revived.
You can hear one of my favorite cuts, purchase or download a copy, and learn more by going to: https://danielhecht.bandcamp.com/album/guitar .
