Monday, August 25, 2014

Sex and Marriage, Redux



Our little boy is four years old and quite a little man
So we spell out the words we don't want him to understand
"D-I-V-O-R-C-E," by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putnam

Growing up in Southern California in the 1950's, none of the boys I knew gave a moment's thought to the possibilities of marriage and raising children.  Unlike the girls playing family with their dolls and dreaming of a white wedding dress, our concern was how NOT to have kids.  It was before the pill when coat hanger abortions were common and dangerous.  Many of us carried around a condom in our wallet, and its outline could be seen long before we had the opportunity to use one.  Horror stories about flawed rubbers were exchanged over the lunchroom table in school.

The story of how I stumbled into marriage was recounted in the initial episode of Sex and Marriage. I consented to calm my first wife's hysteria about the possibility of my leaving.  And when I finally walked out the door (or rather was locked out late one night), I left my two young boys behind, telling myself that she would kills herself if I took them away from her.  I had sufficient reason for leaving from the confession she taped to the TV set before I came home one night that told of multiple affairs -- with her best friend's husband, several next door neighbors, a number of one-night stands with strangers, and my brother's friend whose hair she offered to cut. Strangely enough, we had a reconciliation of sorts for three weeks until the night I came home drunk to find I was unable to open the door (it was only because of a wind storm which I misinterpreted, but took it as a sign). But, truth be told, I left to get my freedom from marriage and from my family.  

Getting locked out was not the worst of the breakup.  A friend in Santa Monica let me stay with him for a few days. And on Sunday I went to the weekly volleyball game on Venice Beach between fellow workers in the rock and roll biz.  Who should show up but my wife and our children!  She was not content to keep our problems private, but began shouting at me, asking where I'd been.  I walked off the beach without looking back and drove up to a friend's farm in Mendocino for a week of distance and healing.  On the way back I stopped off in Bolinas to visit a friend for some sexual commiseration.  And back in Hollywood, my friend Diane, who was also Chuck Berry's girlfriend, found me a room in a apartment house for retired film folk next to Grauman's Chinese Theatre (torn down long ago).  Eventually I found a crash pad in a duplex just off Venice Beach where I lived for two long years.

I had no idea how to be a single father.  Once she saw the breakup was permanent, my wife agreed to weekend visits by the kids every two weeks.  I bought bunk bed cots and a big TV, and subjected them to a routine of fast food and movies.  Swimming in the ocean was always an option, but Venice was not yet a safe tourist destination.  Junkies and Jewish refugees cohabitated in the run-down beach-front apartment buildings.  When I bought my eldest a bike, it was stolen within a day. My lifestyle was increasingly drug related.  LSD and speed was easy to obtain and I remember one all-night party which culminated in a dawn drive in a convertible with wired and blitzed friends. I took along my two boys, and I should have been arrested.

Leaving them with their mother may have been the worst thing I ever did.  She remarried an artist and they moved from Sierra Madre to Durango to Sonoma, giving them a half-sister along the way.  While I had moved north to Santa Cruz and dried out, my children's parents got heavily into cocaine and booze.  Their mother has been a lifelong user of Valium which she argued made her almost normal.  Although I'm not giving up my share of the blame, their lifestyle had similar yet different effects on our sons.  One became an alcoholic who would die from substance abuse at the age of 42 and the elder became a workaholic whose obsessions would prove uniquely successful.  

My wife handled the divorce and did not ask for alimony, probably because she assumed I would use her "confession" of serial adultery as evidence against her.  After the breakup and before the move north, I indulged my senses and wrecked my body in a two-year bacchanalia fueled by rock and roll and drugs.  My access as a PR man to musicians was attractive to groupies and star fuckers.  I toured with Elton John, the Rolling Stones, The Who, Eric Clapton and Crosby, Stills Etc.  I went to concerts in Hawaii and London, a conference in Paris where Stéphane Grappelli played dinner music, and a recording session by the Stones in Kingston, Jamaica. There was always a dealer handy.  My one romantic affair during this time, with the younger sister of my secretary, ended when I chose cocaine over her.   Friends identified me as a basket case and I lost jobs, finally getting fired by my boss when I wouldn't leave my office where I'd locked the door and played music at full volume.  On alternate weekends I would take my sons to dinner and the movies (my eldest still remembers all the titles). My surviving son, who hasn't spoken to his mother in 10 year, chose not to have any children with his wife, for obvious reasons.  

In the Santa Cruz Mountains I became the hippie I'd always wanted to be, lived on unemployment and wrote poetry which I read at local restaurants and coffee shops on bills with singer-songwriters.  There I fell in love with a chef from one of the restaurants who wooed me with steak and shrimp take-home.  She'd been a topless-bottomless dancer for a brief spell in Alaska and was then cooking and drawing pictures.  We met at a luncheon to celebrate her divorce from a man who had made a fortune in the early Silicon Valley.  Our days consisted of sleeping in late, going to outdoor parties, dancing at the Catalyst, taking mind-altering chemicals, and sunning at the nude beach. And sometimes my boys would come from far away to visit and sleep our couch (after I moved into her tiny apartment).  

She had tried unsuccessfully to get pregnant when she was married.  The daughter of an alcoholic airline pilot from Connecticut, she was very close to her mother and I think wanted to duplicate that relationship with her own child.  I was of two minds about having children.  My first experience had been such a failure that I never wanted to repeat it.  On the other hand, it seemed like the most loving thing I could do for her.  We were quickly successful, but when she told her mother, she learned in no uncertain terms that marriage was required before further communication.  We were married in March under flowering fruit trees at an organic farm by a lawyer with a certificate in the Church of Conservation.  His wife played the guitar and sang songs to Kahlil Gibran poems.  

Our daughter was born in a big brass bed in the birth center of a local hospital where we spent the night after I gave her a warm bath.  We buried the placenta under a rose bush in front of our house. I was entranced by this little thing with lots of hair.  We swung together in the hammock I put up between two trees in our yard, and I was very good at dancing her to sleep.  Now my thought was that perhaps I could do it right, be the kind of father I saw in the models around me in Santa Cruz of caring men who easily put their own needs aside for that of their children.  When she was three, we moved back to the town where my wife grew up in Connecticut and lived in a large house with a yard that required a ride-on lawn mower.  I got a good job and commuted to Manhattan by train.  We got a dog (who promptly ran away), and our daughter trick or treated in the neighborhood on Halloween in a ballerina's costume.

When my wife began her campaign to have another child (so our daughter would not be an only child, now seen as a bad thing), I should have paused to reconsider.  In the early months of her first pregnancy, she had experienced some bleeding, and our sex life screeched to a halt.  After the birth, she moved easily from the role of lover to that of mother.  The wild and crazy earth woman I'd encountered in the Santa Cruz Mountains went into hibernation.  I responded to diminished intimacy by studying religion in my spare time, reading books and visiting churches. It only took a week for us to get pregnant the second time and it was the last sustained sex I would have in our marriage.  After the pregnancy and birth (it only took an hour at Yale New Haven Hospital and we left before the free filet mignon meal), we drifted into separate worlds.  I was the breadwinner and the intellectually curious student of a wide variety of subjects.  When called upon, I fulfilled my fatherly duties.  But I increasingly felt alone.  We were no longer a couple or a team. Just as her father had been a threat in her family (he would pass out at the dinner table into his food), I took on that role for her in ours.  We rarely agreed about child raising issues and she would frequently defend the children against my attempts at discipline (the main thing I'd learned from my father).  

After returning to California with our son and daughter, I converted to Catholicism and returned to school as an undergraduate majoring in philosophy.  We turned a succession of small mountain cabins into comfortable homes and socialized with a wide network of friends.  Many looked upon us as the ideal family.  When I received my diploma at a school ceremony, my wife stayed home with a bad back; it was a sign that I missed at the time.  A high school dropout, she was intimidated by my university friends.  As the kids got older, she took up jazzercise, then weight lifting, and finally African dancing and drumming.  At one point I counted our sexual encounters and determined they averaged once every six weeks.  She said it was because she was afraid of getting pregnant again, and suggested I get a vasectomy.  After a horribly painful week, I was sterile.  But it didn't seem to change her lack of interest.

Is sex on the internet adultery?  When Macs could capture high quality photography and video, I got a new model.  Given my experiences in the music business, I had little resistance to temptation.  I locked my office door and pretend to be doing research.  Our problems were complicated by two sizeable inheritances that my wife kept separate from our income, mine as a student teacher and hers as a face painter at county fairs. When our children were small and I had a decent income, I supported the family and gave her the check book.  But when her ship came in, she sailed without me and resented any of my thoughts about sharing.  By then our daughter was out of school and I cooked dinners for my son while she went to various African dance classes and events.  In my spare time I studied and surfed for porno.

Aside from some of the more sordid details, the end came quickly.  She went on a trip to Mexico for several weeks with friends, and I went to the urologist for a biopsy.  It came back positive for prostate cancer.  I worried that my wife would interrupt her holiday for this bad news, but she was hard to reach.  When she returned I learned that she had been more than friendly with their guide. My upset seem to exacerbate hers.  After visiting an oncologist about killing the prostate with radioactive seeds, we got into a horrendous fight on the drive home.  Once there, sitting at our dining room table, she announced that she wanted to live alone.  She wanted to be with people like her brother (a macho real estate salesman, but a really nice guy) and people in their 50s, not 12 years older geriatrics like me.  I felt like little more than a sperm donor.

I left that night, later moving out my things (including a very large book collection), lived in a collection of borrowed or rented rooms, and we were divorced a year later (she did it by herself since I refused to participate in mediation).  She'd found a new boyfriend a couple of months after I left, who taught her to surf, and they were soon married (for the insurance, she told me).  She bought out my share of the house which allowed me enough funds for a couple of years of world travel.  Both of our kids took her side in the divorce, and although we maintained cordial relations for a few years, we now are estranged.  They're appalled that I would marry a woman younger than they (a story for later).  My daughter, after tricking me into co-signing a school loan that she used to live on for a couple of years without telling me, now wonders if I molested her when she was 2 (it used to be the nursery school teacher but now her target is me).  I didn't know what to say, except "no, I didn't," and to tell her to get psychological help. 

So now I'm a twice-divorced, thrice-married man, an expat in Thailand who has unexpectedly found a deep love and fulfilling relationship late in life with a woman from Phayao in the north of Thailand (another, much different, story from these).  One of my children died (and I often ponder the amount of my blame), two no longer speak with me, and my eldest son and I exchange light thoughts on Facebook.  I think he was right not to have children. It didn't provide me with much satisfaction.  I could talk about my father and mother as being poor role models (my mother said HER mother didn't know how to give affection, and my father was sent to military school by his step-father after his father's early death), but that would be to unfairly to shift the blame.  In the long run, I can't say much about sex, marriage or love.  I never got any of it right.  Until now.

This song is for my boys and I, and my father as well.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Sex and Marriage



Love and marriage, love and marriage,
Go together like a horse and carriage

Sex and marriage, however, go together like apple pie and chopped liver.

Sinatra was married four times, to the original Nancy, Ava Gardner, Mia Farrow and finally for the last 22 years of his life to the former Las Vegas showgirl who was the widow of Marx Brother Zeppo.  He also had very public affairs including engagements with many prominent ladies that included Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, Juliet Prowse, Marilyn Monroe and Angie Dickinson. Clearly he loved women, but was it for marriage or for sex?

I've only been married three times, and the half dozen or so serious relationships I've had over a long life never made it to the engagement stage.  Was Sinatra ever a model for me, more so than Hugh Hefner, the guru of Playboy?  Someone once told me I looked like Old Blue-Eyes and I did not take it as a compliment.  Or maybe they said I resembled Humphrey Bogart.  The mind plays tricks at this age.

Why did I marry?  With my first wife, it was to ease her high anxiety that I might leave the small room in Berkeley with the fold-out bed where we were living and never come back.  One night I had to coax her out from under the bed where she was indulging in a bit of hysteria.  She hated lying to the landlord about being a Mr. and Mrs.  So to soothe the troubled waters at home while I worked as a summer replacement reporter across the bay at the Chronicle, I consented to marry her, a possibility that had not before then crossed my mind.

Conveniently, my father's cousin who lived in Marin County was an Episcopal priest.  Years earlier my family had visited him in Tucson where his wife's hefty inheritance maintained their country-club lifestyle.  But in his mature years he saw the light, turned his back on a mediocre sales career and became a man of the cloth. During a "fish-in" for native fishing rights near Tacoma, Washington, he was arrested with Marlon Brando.  At Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, he was assistant canon to the noted liberal Bishop James Pike.  Who better to marry us?

During a leisurely lunch by their pool, my relative the priest and his wife soon ascertained that the woman I wanted to marry and I were sleeping together in Berkeley and had been for some months.  This was 1963 when puritanical attitudes about sex and marriage still prevailed, and "shacking up" was rarely an option for the middle classes.  In the City by the Bay to the south the beats were about to transmute into the hippies and all moral hell would break loose.  But for my relative the priest it just wouldn't be proper to marry someone who was already cohabitating.  During a subsequent phone call to discuss arrangements for the wedding, he asked: Would you mind sleeping apart before the ceremony?

That would never do.  So we headed south where my college roommate and his wife were staying in the beach house of his step-father, and we were married by a justice of the peace in Laguna Beach. Our honeymoon dinner was held with some additional friends on the patio of a restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico. For dessert, we visited a notorious bar where female performers were rumored to do nasty things with a donkey.  My best man snuck upstairs with a waitress, much to the displeasure of his wife.  Back in the U.S. that night, a nasty sunburn prevented my new wife and I from any thoughts of wedding night sex

Contrary to the dreams of teenage boys, marriage does not guarantee a steady diet of sex.  I think I realized this not that long before the woman I had been sleeping with became my wife.  Six months earlier I had been living in the lonely isolation of a basement room in an Italian lady's house on Leroy Street in Greenwich Village.  Intent on a writer's life, the only outlet I found was to type passionate love letters to the woman I'd met at my going-away party in Pasadena.  We spent the night talking before my train left for the east, and during the cold New York winter I imagined her to be my muse.

She liked the attention, I'm sure, but did not respond in kind; clearly I was not yet her white knight. So at the first sign of a thaw, I returned to California and set about wooing her into bed. Initial resistance only fueled my desire.  On a picnic I dropped a wine bottle and seriously cut my hand on the broken glass.  My wounds appeared to open her heart.  A day or so later we got into the shower together and afterwards in her bed consummated my campaign to capture her heart and unlock the mysteries of her body.  Was it love?  Hardly.  Was it just about sex?  Humans seem unable to rut with the animals without clothing the act in fine linen.

I learned everything I know about sex during furtive discussions at the back table with other 8th grade boys in the lunchroom at our junior high school.  Vaginas, one aspiring physiologist told us, took time to move from the lower stomach of a girl down to between her legs.  If you want to get her excited, blow in her ear.  But not too hard.  Watch out for braces which could be dangerous. Girls that disappear (and there were a few) got pregnant and had to go away to have the baby. Run round the bases as fast as you can, from kissing to fucking.  But in those early days all kinds of sex was equally imaginary.

In my home sex was never a topic, though my parents did have a copy of Alfred Kinsey's book on their shelf next to the Reader's Digest abridged book collection.  I thumbed through copies of National Geographic looking for the photos of naked natives.  Love wasn't discussed much either beyond the obligatory professions required of children in exchange for...everything. The lives of my parents did not seem all that different from that of the bumbling adults in the numerous family sitcoms on nightly TV we watched while eating our meals from TV trays.  Mom bickered and Dad responded with indignant silence.

Girls played with dolls and engaged in extended foreplay over weddings and marriages and babies.  In my experience, boys never aspired to marry and raise a family.  It was simply not one of the choices we imagined for the future.  The models presented to us on television, in the movies, and in our own homes, of marriage were not appealing.  I wanted to be a movie actor, a musician, or a famous writer, but never did the thought of being a husband cross my mind.  If anything, it was the consolation prize in a life that failed to live up to one's expectations.

Sex was a territory to be conquered.  I recall long, sweaty make-out sessions that finally yielded a flash of bare skin, smooth to the touch.  It was a contest with the girl holding back until she could be certain that the abandonment of her modesty would hook the attention of the desired object, a pimply-face boy who might prove to be an asset in the complicated social setting of a school yard. Love at that stage was the ramped-up desire of infatuation,  an accidental by-product of the hand-to-hand combat of an adolescent boy and girl (though same sex equivalents may have taken place, I have no knowledge of it). On a New Year's eve while a one friend drove us from Pasadena to Long Beach and back, another friend and I dipped our fingers into the honey pots of our dates. Unchartered territory!  Bliss!  A year or so later I finally did the ultimate deed, rutting in the front seat of my parents' car at the drive-in while watching "Bambi" with a willing companion.  As sex goes, it was more fumbling than fucking, but at last I'd made it to the finish line.  After that, it was all down hill.

My first wife and I stayed married for nearly ten years.  We were both unhappy much of the time and the sex was mostly unreliable and not very satisfying.  As the mother of our two sons, I would be reluctant to deny feelings of love for her but they were drenched in the grip of obligation.  She was jealous of my life outside the family cage and her attempts to break free took a disturbing turn.  When she initiated a threesome, it turned out that she was having an affair with the other woman's husband.  Moments of honesty led to brief intimations of new possibilities. But her deep despair, like the anxiety on the eve of our wedding, could not be assuaged with valium and serial sex partners.  I walked away feeling a failure at everything I'd tried with her: marriage, sex, and fatherhood.

Sex and love: two sides of the same coin?  A marriage without one or the other would be a mistake.  But what is marriage anyway, other than a socially sanctioned way to guarantee the protection and survival of the offspring by the father and to prevent the mother from soliciting other sperm donors on the sly? Admittedly, that's the cynical view.  In a more romantic perspective, it's the seal of approval by the community when two hearts beat as one.  My second marriage might qualify under that rubric, although toward the end my wife would claim she only agreed to marry because her mother refused to speak to her unless she did, having learned she would soon be a grandmother.  This time it was me arguing for the value of marriage and the seal it gave for the permanency of the union.  But that's another story.

Monday, August 11, 2014

The Banjo Player from Portland Town


I have seen this tattooed hand through a ship port-hole,
Steaming on the watery main through the waves so cold,
Heard his tinkling banjo and his voice so grand
But you must come to Belgium to shake the tattooed hand
Donovan, "Epistle to Derroll"

On a snowy night in early 1965 my pregnant wife and I crossed the English Channel in search of the legendary banjoman, Derroll Adams. I was writing a story about Jack Elliott and needed his help.  Elliott and Adams had combined their voices and stringed instruments together in the late 1950's to spread American folk and country music throughout England and on the continent, leaving a slew of guitar and banjo disciples in their wake. Elliott eventually returned to the U.S. where he consolidated his reputation as a unique performer, but Adams had stayed behind. His memories of their time together were important for my story.

We checked into a hotel and left a message at the Cafe Welkum just off the Grand Place in Brussels and that evening he came to get us.  Tall and lanky, with a smooth gravely voice that could melt the coldest heart, Derroll regaled us with stories that went far beyond his adventurers with Jack and his spotty musical career.  In the company of a couple of other singers, we traveled around the city that night from bar to bar, where they sang their songs for drinks and tips.

My story about Jack appeared in Sing Out! in 1966 (reprinted as a blog post here).  Not long after our son was born, Derroll showed up at the door of our London flat. He looked terrible and was suffering from the DTs.  He'd been asked to leave Belgium after a series of misadventures resulting from an excess of drink.  We offered him our couch while he tried to sort out his next moves.  During the several months he stayed with us, I tried to help him get back on his feet. Before long he found a few folk clubs that would give him work so long as he behaved.  I told him about Donovan, a young singer I'd met at rehearsals for the TV show "Ready, Steady, Go," and Derroll soon got together with him, giving Don a direct line past the Dylan he'd been imitating to the original for both, Woody Guthrie whom Derroll had known in California.  Derroll, Donovan and Dylan can be seen together in a scene from Dylan's film s"Don't Look Back."  Derroll, unfortunately, is obviously drunk.

While Derroll was living with us, I took the opportunity to talk with him about his life.  Drunk or sober, no one could tell a more fascinating story.  Were they all true?  Mostly.  I put my notes together for Sing Out! and the article was published in the December/November 1967 issue after we had returned to the United States. I have reprinted it below.

In 1972, after a few disastrous career decisions, I grabbed a fist-full of credit cards and took my family to Europe in an attempt to duplicate the success I'd had as a journalist in the 1960s.  When nothing immediately materialized, we crossed the channel to visit Derroll in Antwerp.  Since last seeing him, he'd met the amazing Danny Levy who had helped him to turn his life around.   There was lots of work and plenty of adoring fans who loved his laid-back banjo style and the songs and stories that connected his own experience with traditional music in the U.S.  Derroll had been invited to play a folk festival in Geneva and we decided to tag along, thanks to my ample credit. After a flight to Lyon, we rented a car and drove south to visit Derroll's ex-wife Izzy and their two children who were living on a farm in Ardeche.  From there we drove through Van Gough country and along the Riviera, stopping in San Tropez for lunch.  Spending the night in Nice, we flew the next day to Switzerland for the festival.  I was pleased to see Derroll so happy and productive.

Working in the music business in the mid-1970s, I found myself at a party one night talking with John Stewart.  I knew that Stewart while a member of the Kingston Trio had recorded Derroll's song, "Portland Town," and claimed copyright to it.  He said he came across the song in Sing Out! and assumed it was in the public domain, a rather lame excuse I thought.  I wondered whether there were any royalties.  Stewart told me he had sold the copyright to a Mafia-controlled music publishing company and that getting any money out of them for Derroll would be difficult.  (An interesting account of this can be found here.)

Four years later, Donovan invited Derroll to join him for three dates in the U.S., at clubs in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.  It was his first visit back to the states and he was looking forward to getting together with his far-flung family in the northwest.  Danny looked after their young daughter Rebecca.  We joined them in Los Angeles where they played the Rainbow and in San Francisco at the Boarding House where Jack Elliott got together again with his old partner. And they stayed with us for a few days at our cabin in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

I'm sorry to say that this was my last contact with Derroll.  It was the 1970s and men and women's liberation was the cultural norm in the left coastal California city where I lived.  All his life Derroll had found people to pick up the pieces from the messes he had created who would forgive him because of the unique and talented performer that he was.  My new wife and I were trying to live an egalitarian life style and I found myself critical of Derroll because of his dependency on Danny and his seeming helplessness outside of anything but his music.

Derroll died in 2000.  On a trip to Europe in 2005 I went to Antwerp and spent the night in the two-storey house in shared with Danny, sleeping on the floor in his art studio.  His art was amazing.  I'd seen nothing of this side of him during our earlier meetings.  I was also happy to learn of how fruitful and celebrated his final years in Belgium had been.  There is a very good web site about Derroll's life here, and much of his music is now available on YouTube.

The banjo player from Portland leaves a legacy that will not be forgotten.  Here is my story from his early years.

The story of Derroll Adams could begin with the year he arrived in Los Angeles with his banjo in the early 1950's and met up with a group of younger, unknown singers of folk music; among them Odetta, Guy Carawan and Frank Hamilton.  His mist important friend for the story would be Jack Elliott, for Jack and he became "rambling buddies." But because Derroll has been an expatriate in Europe since 1957, he is little know in America and his reputation in the U.S. has been made by the singers he met in California, and by the people who have heard him and played with him in Brussels and London.  This reputation, for one who has never met him or heard the records he recorded with Jack in London and Milan, takes the appearance of a legend.  He is a banjo player and singer in the tradition of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, a creative musician who has evolved and extremely personal style firmly rooted in country music.  He is also an eccentric iconoclast, an unusual character whose life dwarfs the creations in two-dimensional beatnik fiction.

This life, with its heightened pleasures and tragedy, began long before he made his way to Los Angeles where he became part of the World Folk Artists group.  But because his life has provided the platform for his music, which concerns us here, his story must begin earlier.

Derroll Lerwis Thompson was born in Portland, Oregon the day after Thanksgiving in 1925, to Gertrude Tompson, whose ancestors had come to the northwest by covered wagon from Arkansas, and her husband Tom, an ex-vaudeville juggler from Marine who carved tombstones when he wasn't drunk.  His mother had been reading an adventure story about a Captain Derroll just before his birth.  She left Tom because of his drinking and married Jack Glenn, a truck driver.  But Jack beat Derroll with his belt buckle and she left him.  George Adams as a tenant in the house where she went to live with Derroll and her mother.  Adams, a salesman and inventor in his spare time from Takoma, Washington, gave Derroll eight pennies for some candy and the small boy persuaded his mother that here was a likely father prospect.  They were married and Derroll took his surname.

Much of Derroll's childhood was spent in the back seat of a car.  His step-father, after studying civil engineering at night school, got a job on the Bonneville Dam power line.  He took his family with him and when not working they hired themselves out as fruit pickers throughout the northwest.  although Derroll's parents were not musical, the car radio was always turned on and they liked to listen to "Grand Ole Opry."  Derroll fell in love with the sound of a banjo.  "Although I'd never seen one before," he said, "I figured out that it must have five strings." In the orchards he listened to the other pickers sing, and his mother bought him a harmonica so he could make his own music.

As a child, Derroll thought he would like to be an airplane pilot or a criminal lawyer.  He also loved cowboys.  Film star Buck Jones as his hero, as well as Lefty Carson, an ex-cowboy who worked in a Portland clothing store in full-dress.  Kids at school called Derroll "Tex" because he wore cowboy clothes.  On a fruit-picking trip he acquired the habit of chewing tobacco from some retired farmers outside a feed store.  Perhaps he had his father's vaudeville blood, because he loved to tell stories in front of his school class about his family's travels, making true facts funny rather than inventing tall yarns.  He took part in school plays, once as Lincoln, and he imagined himself to be Maurice Chevalier.  "I used to juggle money in my pocket, just like he did, kiss women's hands, and dance down the street."

Jack and Derroll
when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Derroll was sixteen and a typical adolescent who was sick of home and in need of adventure.  Lying about his age, he joined the Army.  But his absence was reported to the police and broadcast over the radio.  George Adams was summoned but agreed to let him stay.  Instead of overseas adventure, Derroll laid mines of the Pacific coast from a converted ferry.  Unexpectedly, he was give a minority discharge after five months and sent home.  within the year, he married a school classmate and joined the Coast Guard in San Francisco. There he was assigned to  naval landing force and trained in judo, deep-sea diving, bayoneting and knife fighting.  His destroyer was going overseas when its main shaft broke and the shift headed back for coast duty.

In the Navy Derroll shaved his head (they called him "moon") and began wearing an ear ring.  Although he spent much of his time with sailors from the south, playing his harmonica with them and learning their songs, he hated the Navy. Constant calls to battle stations made him nervous and the teasing by his shipmates because of his religious beliefs brought him to the edge of a nervous breakdown and finally pushed him over.  "My mother believed in Unity and faith healing," he explained, "and I used to keep pin-up pictures of Jesus in our car.  Once I healed an old woman by praying with her.  I told people I thought that God was love and everywhere, and that there wasn't any heaven or hell, and they laughed at me." One night, Derroll took a knife and went after a lieutenant who was particularly cruel.  He was stopped in time but was sent to the hospital on Treasure Island in San Francisco.  Once there he found he couldn't remember what bothered him and his illness was diagnosed as "psychoneurosis anxiety."

"The war reduced me," Derroll said. "I realized that I had to go out and kill people, and that I might die.  We didn't do any fighting, but we always had to be prepared, and the tension was terrible.  I became afraid of everything.  Before the war I'd lived in a cozy niche, believing everything anybody told me.  But he war made me feel that the world was full of lies."

Derroll told the doctors that he wanted to do nothing else but grow flowers and paint pictures, so they released him with instructions to take it easy for a year and "learn to laugh." He returned to Portland, became a father for the first time, and enrolled at Museum Art School, an extension of Reed College. "I'd decided to be an art teacher and teach the eskimos," he said.

Derroll and Pete Seeger
Derroll studied other things as well as art.  He joined the Vedanta Society, tried various drugs, kept his ear ring and grew a beard, joined the Progressive Party to campaign for Henry Wallace, and held Marxist classes at his studio.  Most of his time was taken up with the banjo, an ancient instrument which his mother had bought from a blind lady to cheer him up on his return home.  the first professional singer he heard was Josh White, at a college concert, and he listened to records by bluegrass groups and the Carter Family, as well as by Burl Ives, Roy Acuff, Pete Seeger, Cousin Emmy, Woody Guthrie, Bascom Lunsford, Cisco Houston, Doc Boggs and Buell Kazee.  "I guess I was the first banjo-playing folk singer in Oregon," Derroll said. "I didn't know how to tune the thing and had to invent my own way.  At first I sang the country songs I'd heard when I was younger, but later I learned labor songs like Jim Garland's 'I Don't Want your Millions, Mister,' and a parady of 'Little Brown Jung.' I went around the state and sang in the grange halls for Wallace."

Pete Seeger's was Derroll's first live influence on the banjo.  At a party after a concert (where Seeger "wowed" Derroll with his music), Seeger borrowed Derroll's banjo to play.  "There was a crowd of wonderful people there," Seeger said, "and I remember having to retune Derroll's banjo."  Seeger told Derroll that Garland, the ex-miner from Kentucky and singer of labor songs, had a broom factory in Washington.

"I went up to see Jim a couple of days later," Derroll said. "We became good friends and sang around the area for Wallace together.  He was a political hero for me because he'd been at the Coal Creek strike.  I remember him telling about his sister, Aunt Molly Jackson, who 'sure was a marryin' woman,' he said.  He didn't like my favorite singer, cousin Emmy.  He said: 'Just because she's got a bad voice, that doesn't mean she's any good.' One summer I was hurt in a logging accident and stayed with Jim until I got better.  He gave me a job at his factory, which made brooms to be sold by eh blind, and told everybody I was a disabled veteran."

Derroll had separated from his first wife, married again, became a father for the second and third time, and parted from her.  He was jailed on a false charge of non-support but released on probation because of his illness in the service.  He found that most of his friends, particularly his political comrades, had turned against him, with a "serves him right" cold- shoulder. So with his third wife he left Oregon for Mexico to study art at the university.  when they arrived in San Diego they discovered she was pregnant and there they remained.

"We were on a health food kick then," said Derroll, "and decided to live on the beach, close to the soil so the baby could absorb the good rays from the earth.  We found a strip of vacant sand just north of Del Mar and set up our tent.  Pretty soon some of the race track crew settled there and we had a regular little village." Derroll first worked as a spray painter for Lockheed, after that as a dish washer, and later on a construction crew.

One night, after seeing "The Thing" at a local theater, they stopped at a spiritualist church on the way home, were told some startingly accurate facts, and became interested in the subject.  "Just for fun, we decided to hold a seance on the beach to see if we could fool some people.  I was the medium and tried to think like a medium would think.  To my surprise and horror, I found out that most of the things I said were right.  One man said to me: 'What kind of a monster are you?'" Derroll's occult powers continued for several years until he tried to prove himself to his skeptic mother-in-law and they vanished.

While living in a trailer camp at Carlsbad one Christmas during the Korean War, Derroll was hired by a taxi company to drive seven Marines back east for the holiday.  "One night in Texas, going 120 miles an hour, the car's light went out.  But we survived the crash with only a few bruises," he said.  "The end of the trip was in Tampa, Florida, where the hotel I stayed at turned out to be a whore house.  On the way back, we were almost arrested in Alabama because it was illegal to ferry people across the country without a special license.  But I told the police I was driving wounded Marines and they let me go.  I made five hundred dollars for that trip and it allowed us to move to Los Angeles. 

Derroll, then a father for the fourth time, worked at a succession of jobs, finally as head truck driver for Max Factor.  But he wasn't much of a testiment for cosmetics, with his sandals, long hair and ear ring.  His face looked remarkably like Van Heflin's.  Derroll's partner on the truck was Sid Berman and one day Berman was surprised to hear him whistling "Pretty Polly." "He asked me if I knew anymore," Derroll said, "and I told him, hell yah, and I play banjo to boot."

"Berman brought Derroll up to meet us," said singer Weston Gavin.  "We were a group of teenagers and people in their middle 20s who were interested in folk music and had organized World Folk Artists, a booking agency and guild.  Herbie Cohen helped run it with me and our entertainers included Frank Hamilton, Odetta, Jo Mapes and Guy Caraway.  Derroll was different from the rest.  He was older, a painter, and didn't seem to be involved in politics, like we were.  He had a growling voice like Lunsford and played his banjo very simply, like an old man looking back over a spent existence with a mild eye.  He was like a gentle man who's hatting with you and at the same time wondering how he'd pay his rent. And at that time Derroll was reading The Journal of Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen while we were stuck on Grapes of Wrath."

Derroll & Jack in London
Derroll moved his family to Topanga Canyon not far from Will Geer, who as "the Santa Clause of the L.A. folk scene," according to Gavin.  He became a father for the fifth and sixth time.  Lord and Lady Buckley, and Bess and Butch Hawes were a part of the Topanga Canyon group, and it was at Geer's house that Derroll first met Jack Elliott, borrowing Bess' banjo to play a duet on "Muleskinner Blues." Woody Guthrie showed up for a short while and everyone helped him clear land in "Pretty Polly" canyon to build a cabin that was never finished.  There Derroll also met James Dean and Cisco Houston.

Jack and Derroll in Paris
Those were productive years for Derroll.  He sang at concerts with the WFA; painted pornographic miniatures; studied Zen and Yoga; composed stories for children about "Pony Bill Derroll," a Bunyanesque character with huge six-shooters he could have draw out of their holsters; and recoded his banjo for the Elmer Bernstein soundtrack of "Durango," a western film starring the late Jeff Chandler. It was at this time that he wrote "Portland Town," his most famous song.  "I got the idea when I was living on the beach.  There was an old couple whose only son had been killed in Korea and I sympathized with them because I had left three children in Oregon I would never see again.  Finally the music came to me and I sang the song for Herbie Cohen and Frank Hamilton." Jack Elliott and Derroll had become good friends, singing together and taking trips up and down the west coast together.  But Jack met June, married (Derroll was best man and sang "Rich and ambling Boys" at the wedding), and left for Europe.  Derroll got a job as a preacher. "I met someone who owned several faith-healing churches.  there was supposed to be a master church but it didn't exist. I was hired as 'Dr. Adams' from the master church, and I spoke on Sundays, usually for five minutes at ten dollars a minute.  But I always spoke the truth.  I never talked about God.  I think I helped the people and they always used to come up afterwards and shake my hand."

One afternoon, Derroll went to see "An American in Paris" and, "I knew I would see Paris soon," he said. Several days later he received a letter from June Elliott asking him to join her and Jack in England, all expenses paid.  Derroll, who was separated from his wife and children, arrived in New York just before the ship. left.

"I was on the same ship with Big Bill Broonzy, but he was in first class and I never saw him" Derroll said.  "I met up with a Gaelic-speaking sailor from the Outer Hebrides and a cockney chap from London and we terrorized the ship.  I had holes in my pants and no underwear.  The people thought I was a movie star because nobody else could look that odd.  I sang hillbilly songs with a girl from Texas who played the guitar and one man seriously said he was surprised that I didn't recite Shakespeare."

Shortly after he arrived, Derroll and Jack were booked for a long engagement at the posh Blue Angel night club in London.  They lived in a broken-down tenament called the "Yellow Door" with Lionel Bart, who later wrote "Oliver," and Scots singer Alex Campbell, who became Derroll's protege on the banjo.  They recorded for Topic in London, and Jack, June and Derroll toured Europe, street singing, and spent the summer in Portofino.  After recorded in Milan, they separated.  Derroll ended up on his knees in a Catholic church in Pompeii, "my banjo broke, sick and hungry." Somehow he got to Rome where a prostitute bought him food and got him a hotel room.  A magazine wrote a story about the "cowboy" and he appeared on television.  Back in Paris, he met and married the daughter of an aristocrat who was also a baron and mayor of his village.  Derroll and his new wife, Isabelle, were forced to leave France by her family and went to Brussels. Because Isabelle had decorated windows for Dior, they set up a decorating business for high couturier fashion shops and within a few years were considered to be one of the best in all Europe in their field.

Outside the Cafe Welkum
Their business thriving, Derroll gave up playing the banjo professionally, except at the World's   I was tired of bumming and scrounging around on the road.  The banjo hadn't given me any peace.  It was always the banjo, never Derroll. Several times in the past I'd smashed my banjo for that reason.  When I was a kid I wanted to be in show business, but after the war I was too afraid of people, of failure.  In Los Angeles, I used to throw up before a performance because I was so scared.  But whenever I'm scared of something, I have to keep trying.  when we were successful in Brussels, though, I didn't need to try any more." For six years, Derroll was a "back porch musician," only playing the banjo at home or occasionally at the Cafe Welkom on a tiny street in the old quarter of the city.  "After all, all of us do our best picking at home." Once he consented to play on television, in a review of the events of the past year.  He became a father for the seventh and eighth time.  "I love Brussels," he said, "and really think of myself as a Belgian."
Fair briefly when Jack came to town. "I'd gotten fed up with playing in clubs to drunk audiences.

Tattooed hands
But his business failed and his marriage broke up.  Derroll bought a new banjo last year and came to London where he was welcomed as a prodigal son.  During the years in Brussels, many folk singers had passed through to meet Derroll.  One couple, Colin Wilke and Shirley Hart, carried Derroll's stories and "Portland Street" throughout England and Europe, creating a legend for him.  Derroll toured the British clubs and played in concerts, and he recorded a record for a London company.  But the LP has never been released.  Executives at the company refused to beieve that lDerroll, with his cowboy hat, hip talk, beard and ear ring, was for real.  "He must be a phoney," they reasoned.  

Donovan and Derroll
There is no end to this story.  After the long retirement, Derroll is playing his banjo again in top form.  Although he would prefer to live on the farm he and Isabelle bought in the south of France, "sitting and thinking," he realizes at the age of forty that playing the banjo is the only way he can make a liing.  "And I know now that I do have something to say.  It boils down to just 'love one another,' and I think people are listening. Last year he met Donovan, the British heir to Dylan's throne, and the two struck up a close friendship.  Frequently seen in the neighborthood of Denmark Street, London's Tin Pan Alley, in his boots and cowboy hat, Derroll knows all the pop entertainers and they think highly of him.  "People who argue about the purity of folk music sicken me," he said. "I don't believe you should sing a five-hundred-year-old song the way it was first sung.  I've always liked all kinds of music; country, even world war one songs, and pop music.  Most of the folk kiddies today have pop records at home.  I believe it's inevitable that pop and folk music will come together.

Pete Singer believes "Derroll is the modern urban equivalent of the old-fashioned mountain man who lived off in his cabin the way he wanted to, making the kind of music he liked and saying, the heck with the rest of the world.  There's a kind of stubborn honesty here which people admire and it's no wonder that Derroll Adams has become something of a legend while he's still a young man."

Derroll and Danny
Not all people admire Derroll's stubborn honesty.  Several clubs in the north of england have banned him beause he swore on stage at a performance.  And the legend illuminates only the glamorous features of Derroll's life, ignoring the unpleasant products of hard living, his trafic marriages, fatherless children, and his long fight with alcoholism.  "One of these days I think I'll write a song about drinking," he said.  "People put alcoholics down and they shouldn't because it will only make them worse.  I think alcoholics should be helped not to worry about their problem.  They should only be encouraged to keep on fighting."

Derroll's music career seems long, hard and complicated.  But to Derroll, only one thing need be said. "I've always loved the banjo, loved the sound of it, loved to play it.  and when I play, whether to myself or before an audience, I always play with my heart, soul and body."


Derroll sings "Portland Town" in 1973