KEELAN over

KEELAN over

RICHARD KEELAN

Richard Keelan visited us to tell us what he has been doing since the sad demise of the Misty Wizards.

Keelan: Well, now I’m just interested in playing—well, not just my own tunes, but I’ve been slipping in

other people’s too. Like Dylan’s “All Along The Watchtower” and “Hey Jude.” Some of Oscar Brown Jr. There’s some real nice things on the Hair album. What I did “Hey Jude” for was mostly for doing in clubs. Like—what I really dig going on stage for, like, with the Wizards we did all our own material except for—I think, two tunes, but now I find that, to just groove with the audience you should do something that they’re familiar with. I find that the nice thing about being a “folk singer” now is that two years ago you had to play almost all traditional. But now you can go to the 1 artist and maybe play something they (the audience) are not too familiar with, and mention the artist’s name, and they’ll listen in that frame of mind. So it allows you to | get—say—into some of Dylan’s newer stuff—like “All Along the Watchtower” just gassed me. Not j when I heard it, when I read it.

Creem: Do you find you read l songs more than you hear them?

Keelan: I find it—yeah—when I i read it, it’ll come home to me quicker. I mean, when I write my lyrics, I work in poem structures. I p sit down at my typewriter and section linesoff as I write them.

Creem: Usually before the music or after?

Keelan: Well, 1 guess you could say usually before the music. That is,

I may have some chord changes to work within—or a rhythm. I guess it’s more putting the words together.

Bit of both really. I like to work with shapes as I type the words. How I place the words on the paper as to how I place the melody—well, not so much the melody as the structure of the music.

Creem: Are you working around much now?

Keelan: Well, not really. I’m just starting getting may name known.

Just before the Spikedrivers I was doing fairly well around town and out-state.

Creem: As a soloist?

Yes, because I’d been around for a coupla years as a soloist because I came into town as a soloist, when the “Retort” was going and the folk scene was a little more open.

Creem: What made you stay in Detroit?

Keelan: I don’t know. I came here for a two week gig. I was born in Michigan. But I never really hung out in Detroit. When I was in college in Kalamazoo I’d come over here. Got to know Redford Township quite well. Pretty weird out there.

Creem: It’s a strange thing, but musicians like Detroit.

Keelan: Yeah, when I get back from New York I like Detroit.

Creem: Mainly ethnic peoplefolk and blues. I suppose it’s something to do with the colored population. Makes them feel very much at home.

Keelan: It’s very stratified here, as far as being an industrial place. It seems to me that the artistic community has such a far out cubbyhole in this society that people can just exist in it without being bothered too much.

Creem: Yeah—people in Detroit seem to accept things. I think the riot seemed to make people ready to accept anything. I’ve found that people in this town are very credible—not gullible, but they will just accept something and not question it. People aren’t like that in—say— NewYork.

Keelan: Well, New York is much more of an unreal place. You can relate to existence, somewhat in this city but New York is almost beyond a concept of what I’d call a city— when ther’s no trees—nothing. It’s not really a city, it’s a machine. People living in a maching gotta go insane. When I first went to New York, that’s where I got started— professionally, I was working in the Village. I liked it. I was 20 and just going through the “sing in the Village for what you get in the basket” stage.

Creem: Which era of the Village was this?

Keelan: ‘62-63. Eric Anderson was around. Still kind of folksy pre-Spoonful days.

Creem: Was Spoelstra around then?

Keelan: When I was in New York I was told he was doing two years of hospital aid work in California.

Creem: He’d already been through the Village then?

Keelan: Yes.

Creem: He’s always quoted as being one of Dylan’s children, in the Village, but noone ever seems to know much about the cat.

Keelan: I didn’t listen to him too much. He was sort of a traditionalcontemporary song writer.

Keelan: Yeah, about ,5 summers ago, I was playing a summer gig in Ohio, which was pretty strange, and this colored cat who was the chef at the fraternity house I played, told me I sounded like Wes Montgomery in parts. I didn’t know who he was at the time, but when I heard him I figured out why. The twelvestring guitar I was playing has the octave strings and he plays in those octave things. But that kind of association-connection happens by accident, because I think that music is just in the air. Like when I went up to Straford last summer, a lot of cats hung around the Black Swan, and everybody there played a guitar—I mean some of them were like really phemenomenal guitarists and most of then were into Jansch and Renbourn then.

Creem: How was Stratford?

Keelan: It was nice. But it’s going to be nicer this year. Joni Mitchell is coming back. Cedric Smith is playing Che Guevara in this play called Che in Toronto. Cedric should be up there this summer too. Good scene.

Creem: Gotta keep us in touch with the events and things up there so people here can make it up there. Keelan: Yes, I just hope that the Nixon bag doesn’t close too tight so’s people can still make it over there.

Creem: How do you write your lyrics? I mean, I noticed between “Break out the Wine” which was written in ‘65, and now, there isn’t really that much of a change in style.

Keelan: Yes, well, I reckon it’s just that I write most of my lyrics concerning life—and the way I live my life is just kinda steady. I feel that I’m stable at least for myself and my old lady. I dig living the way I do—and—if the way I think about it can help someone do something about the way they live, then I think that’s groovy. I don’t get into creating story lines too much,

Creem: So at the least, you’re a protest singer?

Keelan: Yes, at the least. I’ve written, early, some songs that I j don’t do any more that were out and out protest songs.

Creem: But they were valid for ! the time that you wrote them, right?

Keenlan: Sure, Sure. I don’t throw anything away. I was just reading some things on Tim Hardin and he was rapping on how he’d written tins and that and lost them and thrown them away. I don’t write like that. If I write something down I have files just to throw scraps of paper in. I discovered, that is, on one song called “Back to the Earth” that I wrote a year ago, and suddenly there was a tune one night and I found the words in a bunch of stuff. I also found that I understood the words better then than I had when I’d written them the year before. I feel that the words—the same as the music—are in the air.

Creem: Yes, but then they’re like a diary like—instead of writing down “Well, I did such and such”, you say where you were at, at that time. So everything you write down provides a back reference to track down what you were into, psychologically, at any given time, in the form of a song or a poem. So like the things that you write down—say—tonight, that you don’t really understand are because they haven’t really happened to you yet other than subconsciously.

Keelan: I’ve had that happen. I’ve woken up in the middle of the night and written down words, and gone back to bed. “The Dancer” and a coupla of other songs happened like that. I think it’s very closely related with dreams. Dreams are prophecies. Daydreams are visions. It’s just that a lot of the terminology for these things, it seems, people shy away from because they have spiritual or religious connotations. So the spiritual experience is in the air and words and music are in the air. The fact that it comes out, through me, as words and music, and someone else as paint on canvas is in itself the religious experience without any organization. It seems to me, about this time element in dreaming and reality and subconscious is at that juncture and that is where you should try to keep yourself at. The very moment or the “now” as the term is. Because the past and the future both, will be, or have been, taken care of.

Creem: But the relationship in writing in relation to the past and the future is—like—all the time Dylan has denied he was saying things— Keelan: Yeah—that’s the same thing Lennon says.

Creem: —yet now he will look back at —say—“Ballad of a Thin Man,” and enjou it, whereas before when he was creating the song, learning and practicing it, he was actually giving part of himself away. Lennon and the Beatles, as you said, have agreed that now they can look back on a song as outsiders, and enjoy it instead of when they created and first performed the song, it was still directly relative to them, and mainly in the case of Dylan, painfully so.

Keelan: Working with a new song, to me anyway, is still a period of uncomfortable association with the song because it’s still so fresh, it is—as you say—giving part of yourself away with the song.

Creem: Like while it still relates directly to you, you’re saying to the audience, “Hey, look—I’m stripping myself naked before you here.” And as a year later when you’ve changed and the song no longer relates directly to you, you just sing as if it were about someone else, and you don’t feel as naked. Like “I am a Rock” for instance, by Simon and Garfunkle. I always thought it very weird to release a song like that—supposedly sung by some cat to tell how desolate and lonely he is—by two people with a full backing behind them. Paul Simon himself, I was talking to him about the unreleased songs on his Paul Simon Songbook album, which is only available in England, and is just Simon playing acoustic guitar and singing; and he said that he probably wouldn’t release them because they were so very personal that he couldn’t involve Art (Garfunkle) and he was not now into where those songs are at.

Keelan: Yes, it’s all based on trends. I think the trend thing is about to explode. The musical scene is splayed out in so many directions that I just don’t think it could get any more complex.

Creem: Yeah, but I think people have been saying that now for many years, but still it gets more complex.

Keelan: No, it just seems to me to be against the walls on all sides now and some of the complexities will have to come out—but—I mean like the Pentangle are still quite complex, but they’re back into the basics of pure folk as well with the acoustic guitars and stuff. Like that thing of going out of folk, through the electric thing and back out again is not so much going back out more to just find another cruising level. It’s a mixture of the two, therefore it’s not the same.

Creem: Yeah, but when you think how quickly the muSic thing is exploding—I mean will there just be one huge cataclysmic explosion of sounds or will people realize it’s time to level off, just what is happening?

Creem: Like exploring branches of a tree and you go along one ‘til the end, and then you go back down and up another branch. But have we now run out of branches?

Keelan: Yeah—well that’s what I meant by the trend thing. The life span of a human trend is getting shorter and shorter all the time. It seems like it might just all level out and tiler’ll just be good music everywhere.

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