According to Chuck McCabe, being a performer is a little like finding yourself in love with an ugly person.
In the Jeans
In his baby book, Chuck McCabe's mother wrote, 'He shows an alarming predilection for country music.'
By Suzanne Cristallo
Photographs by Kathy De La Torre
Who can say where it comes from--that "moment of clarity" when everything falls into place and you have a bit of truth? Chuck McCabe says it comes from something someone says or does, and when that moment hits, he writes it down fast--on a napkin or scrap of handy paper--because if he doesn't, it's gone forever, like a dream in the morning.
McCabe's a Los Gatos songwriter-humorist. He's been around locally since 1970, playing about 200 gigs a year, alone or with other musicians, at places lately such as The Cats restaurant, the Highland Games and Celtic festivals, or the Lupin Naturist Club. He says he's played "every ginmill, dive, saloon, coffeehouse, supper club and tourist trap from Disneyland to Saigon."
He's a singer and a banjo/guitar player, a rock & roll, country music, Bluegrass man whose days begin at night. But more than a convenient label, he's someone who is compelled to tell what he sees to those around him ... set to music.
His music is like a good neck rub. It gets you to relax and think about a lot of fine things you'd like to do.
It's a mean old world, my friend,
Life is hard and then it ends.
Livin' it up is the best revenge ...
Compulsion is a big part of being a musician. How else would one explain the attraction of life in some bar five nights a week, McCabe asks, or of your neighbors viewing you as a bum because you wake up late every day with squinty red eyes, smelling of smoke; of being on the road and dealing with mothers of the bride who want to tell you how to play; caterers who want to use band members as "go-fers;" pals who hang around to steal your jokes, your riffs or your drummer; or the flirty cheerleader-type who wants to use you for some hidden agenda?
McCabe asked that question in a book he wrote in 1993, called Uncle Rhythm's Cosmic Riff and Gig Guide. He dedicated it to "the unsung singers, sidemen and would-be stars who go to all the best places--through the service entrance--to eat great food on a 15-minute break."
The closest answer he can offer is that "something happens when you're on stage playing ... that feeling you get when the absolute cosmic truth pours out ... and moves your soul, along with the soul of anyone else within hearing distance who's got any soul ... that moment when time stands still."
Being a performing musician "is a little like finding yourself in love with an ugly person," he adds. "You can't justify it to your friends, relatives or even yourself much of the time ... ."
Being a communicator is a lot of what a musician is. For that role, McCabe has the advantage of genes and family culture. He's Irish. His great-grandfather, Alex McCabe, came from Belfast, and his great grandmother--''she was a Cusack"--hailed from Limerick. Nowhere in the world is there a bigger compulsion to tell it--whatever it is--than among the Irish whose pain, sentimentality and humor find release in music and verse.
I keep drinking malted milk
Trying to drive my blues away ...
And he has "Rhythm." "My fingers and toes twitch and tap in time to this music that's always there in the background, like the soundtrack to My Life," he writes. "Under the table, inside my shoe, the beat goes on."
Describing how the gift of rhythm pays off in front of an audience, he employs a series of similes. The view is from behind a guitar ... "My fingers are hopping around the fretboard like fleas on a hotplate. They do rhythm aerobics: leaping, sliding and stretching all up and down the neck of the guitar like a big pink spider ... [My fingers] look like a team of four, bald-headed sausage-men working together. My thumb toils the dark side of the neck and peeps over the top from time to time to see that things are going well ... my knees flex, my head nods, my body sways ... I am the rhythm."
Along with all the natural attributes McCabe has to enrich his music, there are his life experiences which give it flavor.
McCabe, 55, was born a "Navy Junior" in Pensacola, Fla., the eldest of three. The earliest memory he has of music is listening with his maternal grandfather to the Grand Ole Opry. In his baby book, his mother wrote, "He shows an alarming predilection for country music." By the time he graduated from high school, he had lived on 12 different bases in as many states, including parts of first grade spent in three different schools. Much of his childhood was spent in a car. "We'd drop Dad at the port, and we'd drive to Florida" (where his grandparents lived).
"I never felt like I really belonged, never had long-term relationships," he recalls of his growing years. "I always felt different from other kids, but in a positive way, because we had been to every national monument and park in the country. I felt like a citizen of the world."
Don't skate where the ice is thin, or eat
your lunch before you swim.
Don't touch that, you don't know where it's been ...
I love you so much it scares me.
Baby, the world is a dangerous place,
You'd be hard to replace ...
In 1961, the Kingston Trio was big. They had the look of the day-- clean-cut and crisp in button-down shirts, open at the neck. Two of their songs, Tom Dooley and Scotch and Soda, were constants on the Hit Parade and on the record player at every college fraternity party.
McCabe was 16 then and listening to the Trio on radio. For the first time, through the group, he really heard music. "It all made sense to me," he recalls. "I saw logic to the chord changes. I could hear them."
He bought a chord book and would sit in the garage, playing the simple two chords in Tom Dooley over and over on the guitar his mother bought for him at a pawn shop. "The music was always there intuitively; I was mainly self-taught," he says. "The rest I picked up from others."
At the time, the family was stationed at Point Magu in Oxnard, headquarters for the Pacific Missile Range. McCabe became friendly with another guitar player, "a hood in pegged pants who drove an old Merc with suicide doors (no handles). He had been in rock & roll and knew what he was doing," he recalls. "Besides, he was the only one with a car."
Together they rounded up a baseball player/singer and a tennis team member/bass player to play in their high school Senior Talent Show. They called themselves "The Three Shillings Plus One." Their Kingston Trio numbers, topped with When the Saints Come Marching In, brought the house down.
Great day's a-comin' but I don't know when I can see the rainbow but I can't find the end
Until the sun comes shinin' again, Luck Penny, you're my friend ...
Chuck McCabe says that when he plays the guitar, his 'fingers are hopping around the fretboard like fleas on a hotplate.'
That was the start of the musical seed that would blossom. It was followed by a stint of three years at the University of Washington in Seattle where McCabe tried to learn something of use for a day job, but his discovery of a Gibson, five-string banjo got him more involved in music, and engineering paled in comparison. "It cost me my degree," he said of his serious entry into the world of music--Bluegrass. That's what the banjo had to play.
"I was working at the Hasty Tasty drive-in in Burlingame," he recalls. "A customer was picking through his change to give me, and I noticed he had two banjo picks among it. I asked him about them. I had a pair in my pocket and showed him." That was the start of a relationship with Lightning Leroy Cheney that would last 20 years.
The two began playing together at a Hootenanny where everybody got up and did his own thing every night. They did Bluegrass, developing a style and a running patter together.
"We'd go to cowboy bars, just show up, playing things like Grandfather's Clock. He'd finger-pick the chimes on the guitar, and I'd play melody on the banjo," McCabe says. "We'd hit maybe five bars in an evening and earn $20 each in tips at each place. That was all the money in the world."
Some they scuffle, claw and climb
Pass you by like they was blind.
Some they hustle nickels and dimes
But they've got theirs and I've got mine ...
During the day, McCabe worked for his great uncle as an apprentice electrician, earning $6 an hour. "But music interrupted again, and I never made journeyman," McCabe recalls.
He and Leroy added a bass player and a fiddler, and named themselves the Slippery Rock String Band. They played the Purple Onion in San Francisco, the Coffee Gallery and the Shelter in San Jose, the Brass Knocker in Saratoga, the Grog and Sirloin in Los Gatos and the Bucket of Blood in Palo Alto.
"That place had one of the roughest names, but there was no fighting," McCabe recalls with a smile. "There were too many Stanford students. But the ABC raided it and bagged 20 kids one wet night. My buddies pushed me out with my banjo into the rain to avoid the agents. I was only 20."
He was in the Navy Reserves at the time. When he found out the tour of duty would be two years, he decided to try the Marines. "They signed me up immediately, understanding as they did how no one would ever want to be in the Navy," he says with a grin.
The duty was for six months. McCabe was relieved. Opposed to the "establishment" as he was, he found it difficult walking between two worlds. He was performing on the side as he carried out his weekend duty with the Corps reserves for the additional obligatory six years.
"My hair was never short enough for the Marines." He found his allegiances in opposition. On the one hand, "I was opposed to the war." On the other, "I was for the people fighting it."
The Marine duty was followed by a stint with the USO. He played with a band through Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, the Philippines, Okinawa, Midway and Hawaii.
"It was a great time to be young," he reflects with a slow smile. "I sowed my wild oats on foreign soil."
Night flowers, bright colors
Light up the night when the street lights bloom.
When the moon shines down the alley, meet me on the avenue...
And it was a time to fall in love.
I like your nose, I like your smile
I like to see your clothes lyin' in a pile
He met her at the Hasty Tasty where he met Leroy. They all quit their jobs and went on the road together. But while he was on the road alone one time, she ran off with another guitar player. He was 24, and it broke his heart.
"The important thing was I had strong emotions. I really had something to say, about something I cared about. I wrote a whole album about that girl and ended up going into a label audition with ABC with about 40 songs. Some were angry, some were hurt about boy and girl. The producer picked about 12 for the album. I never knew how it did. I just let the contract expire, but I still send Christmas cards to the girl."
At 25, McCabe was on the road again as a single. He was doing folk, oldies and pop: James Taylor, the Beatles and Elvis. Then the Eagles. "Things really started to happen," he notes. "I was playing every steak and lobster place in the area. They were the places to go." While he admits he's jaded about playing bars now, then it was like "being a kid in a candy shop."
"It was the most astonishing, eye-opening thing that ever happened," he says of his unfolding adulthood when there were girls everywhere, all interested in getting close to musicians. "We were the center of attention which was very important." His book, Uncle Rhythm's Cosmic Riff, is all about that time of his life.
In Los Gatos, it was the Grog and Sirloin (now Double Ds) where everybody played seven nights a week, the Doobie Brothers, Juice Newton ... "Back in those good ole days, chips were something you ate at the bar, and we were still listening to eight-track tapes."
The audience was filled with former hippies, now working as engineers and computer programmers, car salesmen and ad men. They were the middle-class, college-educated working folks who enjoyed a good steak and a stiff drink.
"They were really involved in music, much more so than today, and they liked to stay to the last call."
The early '70s found a split in the town where entertainment choices were concerned. "The mainstream then was into disco and polyester, but that was on the other side of the freeway at places like the Los Gatos Lodge. Everybody in our group looked down on them," McCabe relates with a chuckle. "One guy used to joke that you could look in the dumpster behind the Lodge after a weekend and find it filled with lipstick-stained leisure suits. It was cheaper to throw them away than clean them."
Chuck McCabe has been entertaining in and around Los Gatos since 1970
It was at the Grog and Sirloin that McCabe ran into Leroy Cheney again. A natural pair, they exuded charisma on stage, ad-libbing each other spontaneously. "We were soul mates ... almost completed each other ... music was almost secondary to our act." They joined up and began doing lots of country--Waylon Jennings, Willy Nelson and Charlie Rich.
They played the Ramada and the Holiday Inn. Was there ever any trouble with an audience?
"One time a lady came up and wanted me to play Achey Breakey Heart. She was irate when I told her I didn't know it. 'What the hell do they pay you for?' she asked. I said 'Lady, they don't pay me enough to play that song.' That's why I'm not at the Holiday Inn any more.
Another time I got into my song, Nose Job and some of the audience got up and left. I don't preach anymore," he explains. "I just tell it like it is, and that doesn't always make people happy."
You've had a
NOSEJOB....!
I'm sure it's just the kind of nose to fit your jet-set life
You've got shoes by Gucci, the bag, Cardin...
Nose by Mack the Knife,
But your eyes look too close together, your chin goes on for days...
I always said you had a big mouth, but it used to be hidden in the shade...
Another member of the audience who gave him difficulty was Cindy Costa. He met her at the Grog and Sirloin 20 plus years ago. "She was with a friend who was enamored of the band," McCabe muses, "but she thought we were lowlife. Leroy and I were very popular then, but it took me weeks to get a date with her. She was a very nice Catholic girl who knows intuitively that whatever a musician says is phony."
Cindy finally gave McCabe a try. They've been married 20 years. "I'm still winning her over," he says.
Through all of his playing years, McCabe has essentially been on his own. Although his dad played trumpet, it merely was a phase in high school. The senior McCabe--actually Charles McCabe II with McCabe the 3rd--was dedicated to his career as a Commander, flying for the Navy for 25 years since World War II.
Neither do McCabe's brother Mike, in Oregon, nor sister Sharon, in Tracy, share his musical inclinations. "My sister once gave me a Kenny G album for Christmas!" he says, attempting to describe the family's musical evolvement. "That's how tuned in they are," he cracks, while adding thoughtfully, "but they loved me."
The real and sustaining support he received came from Leroy Cheney and other performing artists over the years. Today, Leroy has a platinum record on the wall in his home in Nashville and enjoys his leisure time in a big boat. McCabe is performing full time--rock & roll with The Boomers at the Los Altos Bar and Grill, Irish music with Paddy's Brew and Hard Travellin' at various local spots, Sons of the Pioneers music in San Ramon and Danville and country rock with Uncle Rhythm at the Campbell concert series. As a single, he's at The Cats next on July 19.
"I'm writing the best stuff I've ever written. I was bogged down for a year or two, but I can't stay away," he says.
He and several other musicians are taking a unique approach. They do their own CDs but share with each other contacts and some gigs, pooling talent and resources. "The Internet is a big part, but we still go to the disc jockeys," he explains. "We're not Michael Jackson or Ricky Martin. The market is fragmented to certain interest groups, but you can hear us on KPIG out in Watsonville, KKUP in Santa Clara or KZSC in Santa Cruz. Requests also can be made on Amazon.com," he says, adding as an explanation, "The era of the independent musician is back."
McCabe draws inspiration for his songs from his life. "The most honest thing I could write about," he philosophizes. "I'm smarter than I used to be, but not nearly as smart as I thought I was. I once asked my Dad how he got through the Depression, WWII and Korea, and 25 years married to one woman, my mom. He answered, 'Just simple. I did what I had to do.' That stuck with me. In my life, I've done what I damn well pleased."
I did what I wanted
I did what I had to
Now I just do what I can...
Chuck McCabe may be reached through Woodshed Productions, 15466 Los Gatos Blvd. Suite 109-161, Los Gatos. Or call 408.358.2427. Email: woodshed@gte.net. Lyrics reprinted in this story with permission from the Chuck McCabe CD, "Burgers and Champagne," a Woodshed Production for BlahBlahWoofWoof Music and Media.
Los Gatos, California Since 1881
