Victory Music (the days before the name...)

Last night I checked email and there was a great comment from my friend Jim Page on my Dorothy blog page, which bought tears to my eyes. And he invited me to go down to a Victory Music “Old Timers” open mike in Tacoma in June. It will also be a late celebration of founder Chris Lunn’s 70th birthday! Jim said that it would blow Chris’ mind if I showed. After all, it all started with the open mike at The Tangent coffee house on University Avenue in Palo Alto in the late 60’s, and we were there!

I think it was the summer of 1968 and I remember being stranded in San Francisco with no money and being rescued from a night on the street by two young gals from Santa Barbara who let me sleep on the floor of their hotel room, smuggling me past the front desk.

The next day I was wandering through the downtown streets wondering what I was going to do to survive, and stumbled into Union Square where a stage and sound system had been set up and performers were playing guitars and singing.

I was carrying my guitar of course, as I always did in those days, and perhaps it was this that attracted the attention of a couple of the musicians who came over to talk to me.

After learning that I was from Canada and had come south of the border to find my fortune in music, they introduced me to Chris Lunn. He was tall (well over 6 feet), lean and handsome with an angular face topped by a bushy mass of ash blond hair (clean cut by the days’ standards) and a winning, infectious grin. He was the organizer of this event and many others like it and the founder/big brother of a musician’s collective in Palo Alto, where he worked in a small office by day, and played music by night.

I was told that if I came down to Palo Alto that I could perform at the local open mike and that might lead to some gigs in the area.

That same afternoon as they were tearing down the stage, I hit the city limits, stuck out my thumb and headed for Palo Alto.

Before long I was haunting the open stage at the Tangent coffee house, which was just a couple of blocks from Stanford University. I might have been impressed to learn that Jerry Garcia also played here, if I’d had any idea who he was.

There is an old saying that when the student is ready the teacher appears. I guess for many of us younger musicians, Chris was that teacher and guide. He himself was a singer guitarist and a devotee of the blues, and had a staggering record collection of blues greats like Bessie Smith, Lightin’ Hopkins, Robert Johnson, and Billie Holiday. I had never even heard of Bessie Smith until Chris introduced me to her on an old heavy-weight disc recorded in the 40's, which he played for me on a visit to his spartan digs in the Palo Alto highlands. If memory serves, and it tends to be a wee bit hazy these days, he told me he had inherited these records and much of his musical education from his parents. I remember thinking something like the 60's version of "How cool is that!"

But he always put himself in the background, and made the foreground available for the young players he was mentoring. He taught us by not teaching, but by befriending us, inviting us to spend time with him, getting us gigs in local coffee houses, restaurants and by boosting us into the spaces to practise performing what we said we wanted to do. This is what he continued to do all of his life in the Pacific Northwest once he moved up here.

I began the first serious attempts at writing my own songs during this California period and Chris published one of the first of mine titled Another Land in a little newspaper musical review that he compiled and distributed called The Kept Press. What a confidence booster that was for an aspiring young songwriter!

Those were the days (my friends, we thought they'd never end) and this is a tiny sampling of the seeds that informed us, shaped us, and took us into our future incarnations.

And Chris if you are reading this, thanks for the enormous and invaluable gifts of your friendship and of your life that you have given us.

For a more fleshed out version of the early days and some pics check out Jim Page's article What Victory Music Means to Me in the March 2006 edition of the Victory Review (page 6 in the downloadable PDF version) at: http://www.victorymusic.org/pdfs/2005-6/vr_mar06.pdf