Fred Dortort

When I was three years old, I gathered all my kiddy records, 78s of “Sam Bass Was Born In Indiana,” “The Bear Went Over the Mountain,” and so forth into a great pile, surveyed what I had accomplished and then proceeded to jump up and down on them until they were reduced to tiny shards. I’ve probably been doing penance for that act ever since. Growing up in Los Angeles, I compulsively watched Spade Cooley and his Western swing band on the local television, even though I couldn’t stand the music and Cooley himself creeped me out because I thought that his head looked like a skull (I might have been on to something there).  When rock and roll came along, it didn’t do much for me at first. Maybe my earliest immersion in music that already was before my time had taken its toll.

I caught the tail end of the folk boom and learned to play songs such as “Wildwood Flower” and “Freight Train” along with a few hundred thousand other teenaged kids about to enter the spaced out sixties, and before long I had picked up an electric guitar and experienced the joys of plugging into a giant amp and controlling the movements of dancers by the tempo at which you played the music.


 

The electric music was just a sideline though. I’d been lucky enough to hear many of the great old-time blues singers and bluegrass bands during the short interval between their being discovered by city folk like me and their becoming part of a giant, temporarily profitable folk music revival industry, followed, generally, all too shortly by their being dead. I teamed up with a banjo playing friend and we attempted to play bluegrass by ourselves, and then hooked up for a short time with a fiddle playing girl from the San Francisco Art Institute. Even with our search for authenticity and purity (embarrassing as it may be to me today), I had a weakness for at-the-time looked down on (by city folk at any rate) country-western singers such as Buck Owens, and found myself having to sing harmony and expostulate narratives while keeping up the beat on songs such as “Sweet Rosie Jones.” We managed to find gigs as novelty opening acts at peculiar small time venues such as the debut of a country-western boutique in Oakland.

Once during those years I was wandering down a street in Berkeley when I came upon someone who seemed even odder than me. He had a long ponytail and was sitting on the porch of a dilapidated house playing the mandolin. We struck up a conversation about music, and I followed him upstairs to check out some of his instruments. Sadly, it was his girlfriend’s apartment and she wouldn’t let him show off his prized plectrum banjo with electric lights around the rim, which apparently was a source of great humiliation to her. This, of course, was Allan Dodge. We either did or did not play a few tunes together, and I lost sight of him for several years.

Time moved on, and after working for a while in Los Angeles I’d saved up enough money to buy a different kind of guitar, a big 30s Gibson arch top, with f-holes like a violin. Owning this guitar made me feel obligated to learn how to play some of the tunes that instruments like it were designed for. Not all big Gibson arch top guitars are created equal, so after years of trading and swapping I ended up with some nicer ones that I play today, sometimes with the Sundodgers—although it turns out you can’t beat modern luthier technology when it comes to making really a lot of noise with an acoustic instrument.

  
 
During this extended (and still ongoing) period of musical expansion Al and I renewed contact. The many hours we spent sitting on various couches at various peoples’ houses watching TV and playing music together led to the formation of a kind of party band composed of most of the Cheap Suit Serenaders and me. One thing that we did have going for us was the ability to play from, say, eight at night until four in the morning—we might not have been good but we were persistent. I remember once after practicing at Robert Armstrong’s house (in the middle of a wheat field near Dixon) seeing Bob with a look of genuine concern on his face about the kind of music that we (including him) had been making. Mostly he was right, but it was fun.
This band went through several stages of existence—at one point it was called Middle Aged Spread, and we managed to get booked at the Mabuhay Gardens. We were nervous about playing in a punk club, partly because even though it was amplified, our music was still probably best suited for people in their seventies and eighties who might actually remember the songs. We recruited two or three new people to play extra rhythm guitar or whatever, just so we would have an at least somewhat intimidating appearance on stage. Of course the crowd couldn’t have been friendlier, or the sound man worse—Crumb had showed up to see us, and out of nowhere several Crumb girls, complete with fringed cowgirl outfits and big boots suddenly became visible, as if they’d been conjured up out of thin air. For those who don’t already know this, while playing on stage in an amplified band, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to hear a single note that the other people are playing, and possibly not even what you are playing. It’s pretty disconcerting until you learn how to get around it, and that night I hadn’t really figured it out. But no one attacked us—which I guess is a kind of favorable review in itself.

Middle Aged Spread (maybe the least appealing name of any we’ve come up with) evolved into Goat Injection—same general idea but more peculiar than repulsive. We lost a couple of Suits because of logistical difficulties in getting together, and added Ed Elliot as bass player and vocalist, Pete Greenstein on all kinds of saxophone and Kathy (at the time) Sheehy (now Mrs. Dodge) on drums. I have to say we played almost as odd an assortment of electric instruments as we now use in acoustic performances. The Goats gradually divided in two like an amoeba, Pete, Ed and Kathy currently making up three quarters of the Wakefield Jazz Quartet, and Al and I teaming up with Glen Jordan who played either very large or very small four stringed instruments. We formed a mostly instrumental trio that gradually grew to include Kathy Sparling as our prized girl singer. She was recommended by a friend, so we put off listening to her for over a year—everyone has a friend who’s a really good singer. Yeah, right. To our amazement when we finally gave her a chance, she actually was really good and almost unendingly agreeable. Not too long afterward, Zac Salem came along, with his songs from the “Mexican Renaissance,” a good voice and a real quick learning curve on all these odd instruments. After a job, at a house where a piano happened to be present, Zac started to play, and we wouldn’t let him stop for forty-five minutes—unfortunately pianos aren’t easy to travel with so not that many people get to hear him.

So here we are. Oh wait, this was supposed to be my bio. Let’s see, my sign is Escobaria, I like to sit by the fireplace and go for long walks on the beach, my pet peeves are people who play old, corny music—wait, I am one of those people! All this may be nothing but a sick, complicated lie!