After The Reunion

The reunion was last July, a full forty summers since we'd left behind the hulking ivy-ed brick edifice of Amherst Central High School. On the alumni association's website is a nice photographic record of the folks who showed up in person for the event. Here it is now almost four months later, on the veritable eve of Thanksgiving (a.k.a. "Festival of the Olives") and I am still dealing with the aftershocks of the rippling waves set in motion by certain individuals who did not show up.

It was in Buffalo that the main spiritquest had launched, after the last of the lifelong friends had shook hands and waved farewell until next time. At the Greyhound bus station I used my cell to take a call while lining up for the next ride to Ithaca. Brian Hollander, editor of the Woodstock Times, asked a few questions about what's gonna be shaking at The Colony Cafe as I flashed a boarding pass and stepped aboard my chariot.

Cousin Will Fudeman plays the mandolin and is a wellness therapist of the acupunctural, massage and herbal arts, lives in Ithaca, and couldn't make the reunion. He did, however, attend the 20th in 1988. In the post-reunion "yearbook" published at that time, several photos showed Will jamming with Jack Herrmann and Bob Bakert on guitars. They were the folkies. I guess we still are.

Jack Herrmann and Will Fudeman at the 1988 reunion.

Will was waiting for my bus as it pulled into the Ithaca station, a hilly town of steep streets. The road to his house glides past narrow canyons and waterfalls. My visit had been talked about for many years, not only as payback for Will's visit to my place in Oregon but to connect again with Jack Herrmann. Jack and I had been band-mates in high school and later had planned to meet in Tennessee for a recording project together in the mid-1990's. His car somehow broke down on the way to Memphis, other hazy complications happened and I ended up back in Oregon before we ever managed to get together.

A few years later I was in Boston and actually had the opportunity to catch a ride for a brief visit with Jack at his home on Cape Cod. But when we wheeled through town, I could only dial up Jack's answering machine. Had to keep rolling, but we caught up on the phone shortly thereafter and apparently Jack had to make a poorly timed quick run to the store.

Jack and I had had some pretty momentous phone calls. He was about the only Amherst person I had stayed in touch with following my 1968 exile from Buffalo. When I had astoundingly found Fritz Richmond living in my Portland hometown, I had been unable to find any reaction among my local peers commensurate to the fact that we had among us the world's greatest jug and washtub bass player. The Jim Kweskin Band had been the New York Yankees of string bands to the teen-aged folkies Jack and myself, as well as heroes to guitar players James Ralston and Steve Plaskin. But I couldn't find them. So I called Jack. He was appropriately impressed. "Fritz Richmond?" he had asked. "Of the Kweskin Band? Holy shit!"

Delmark Goldfarb and Jack Herrmann, 1968.

We talked again on the phone after the 1988 high school reunion, which Jack attended but I didn't. In his report, he asked me if I'd heard about James Ralston. I could remember James from seventh grade on, with his Harmony Sovereign guitar. James had clued me in one afternoon to the guy who wrote "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," a Peter, Paul and Mary favorite which I listened to at least once a day. "The guy's name is Dylan . . . ," James had explained as he had unsleeved his Freewheelin' LP ". . . like in 'Matt Dillon.'"

It was hip to unravel source material. We were always examining and comparing the folkie teams of the Kingston Trio, Greenbriar Boys, Chad Mitchell Trio, Christy Minstrels and such. Then arrived The Lovin' Spoonful and the Paul Buttterfield Band. If any of these people came to town, the most wide-eyed witnesses to the evolving folk-rock scene would be myself, Steve Plaskin, Jack Herrmann and James Ralston.

In the 1988 post-reunion yearbook listings it said that James was with some agency, I figured it might be a real estate organization. Jack Herrmann's telephone update was quite different. "He's with Tina Turner," he told me with a laugh. "Jim Ralston is Tina's guitar player." Amherst Central High School could now add one more to the iconographic pantheon of alumni which included Eric Andersen and Andy Kulberg.

Andy Kulberg with the Blues Project

My music career had been launched in the seventh grade with the acquisition of a pocket-sized plastic aquamarine transistor radio. With this portable life enhancement device, I would be able to provide my own background music, a major step toward achieving teen-age hipness. In 1962 when I first clicked that baby on, I was soothed by the tinny tones of “Do The Loco-Motion” by Little Eva buzzing out of the half-dollar-sized speaker. Also dominating the airwaves at the time was a lot of “Roses Are Red, My Love,” “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do” and “Sherry,” top hits for Bobby Vinton, Neil Sedaka and The Four Seasons, respectively.

As I approached my twelfth birthday, the world nearly came to an end. In October, President Kennedy had appeared live on national television to announce that he could not allow soviet missiles to be planted in Cuba. And in order to enforce his ballistic prohibition, the United States was more than willing to shake the biggest stick necessary. My folks were pretty upset with these pronouncements, mother crying “This is it . . . this . . . is it!”

Miraculously, the Russians turned around and took their missiles back, and by Thanksgiving we were assured that total destruction was not as imminent as it had appeared. But all over the neighborhood families were digging fallout shelters and stockpiling basements with emergency rations and survival gear. At school we continued to practice air raid drills in preparation for a nuclear attack. I became aware of the possibility that I very well may die beneath my desk.

The grim forboding onset of young adulthood was exacerbated by the required ritualistic preliminaries within my tribe: chiefly dance lessons and Hebrew school, both concepts of which were thoroughly unsettling to my inner being. In the dark winter of seventh grade, I distinctly felt the suffocating crush begin as I was pressed, folded and re-shaped for a push through a conforming cultural mold, measured and fitted by the mastery of robotic fox trots and the mind-crushing memorization of arcane bar mitzvah mutterings.

Beset by bleary stretches of misery and angst, I was not comfortable with this world. Social “outsiders” became an attraction, such as “beats” and “rebels” and my mind opened to pragmatic religious customs such as astrology, Zen, voodoo and the art of “being.” My pocket radio was my solace and window to a richer, wiser, wilder world.

In the dead of winter, in upstate New York, I heard a new song which clarioned the arrival of the “folk music boom.” Instead of the syrupy strains of Steve Lawrence’s number one hit, “Go Away Little Girl,” or other current romantic ditties, a cheery chorus was welcoming the listener to

“Walk right in
Sit right down
Daddy let your mind roll on.”

This wasn’t rock ‘n’ roll, it was unadorned vocal harmonies with the throbbing natural tone of twin twelve-string guitars, no drums. I went instantly nuts over it as did enough people to sustain the Rooftop Singers “Walk Right In” as the number one best seller for two weeks. At least there was a song with a message I could identify with: Relax. Be yourself. Live and let live.

Jack Herrmann melds with a Gibson flat=top.

Beset by bleary stretches of misery and angst, I was not
As my ears were bathed in repetitions of that song, I became more convinced of its truth . . . that we have value just as we are. Respect the individual. Nobody needs to be putting anybody else though any changes. “Walk Right In” let me feel like an okay guy.

Bar Mitzvah year provided a platform to manhood. With the Rooftop Singers kicking off 1963, a new theme song for my transistor earpiece, major changes took place in Buffalo. A new library was built downtown at Lafayette Square, which at that time was the terminix of my furthest wanderings. At the other end of the rambling radius was the University of Buffalo campus, a vast prairie of meadows dotted with bustling shrines of science, language, arts and such. But what interested me most was Norton Hall, the student union, where I first encountered clusters of young Brooklyn-accented guitar pickers and folk song strummers.

It was hard to focus on Hebrew school, which I attended with Will Fudeman, Jerry Tokars, Clayton Pasternak, Shelly Stromberg and Dan Oved from Amherst. More than once I had been reprimanded by the rabbi for sneaking away into the unoccupied synagogue and cranking up the pipe organ.

Facing the big thirteen, I was further blown away by a new sound on the television. The theme song of “The Beverly Hillbillies” featured some kind of instrument playing some kind of music which was euphoric ambrosia to my ears. Soon thereafter I learned about Earl Scruggs and the existence of bluegrass music. Under the buffering influence of fresh melodies I made it through the series of Friday night bar mitzvahs and weekend bowling parties.

My mega-ritualistic turn at the Torah came the last Friday of October, and I amassed some loot which included record albums, particularly the Four Seasons, Jan and Dean and the latest by Peter, Paul and Mary who had won a Grammy for the previous year’s “If I Had A Hammer.” Up on the university campus, I had heard people playing the same tunes from the album. It had appeared that I might have been able to play along if I’d had a guitar, but there were plenty of guitars. So I applied my bar mitzvah funds to the acquisition of a five-string banjo.