Chris Ramey (left) and Jim Dewrance recently teamed up for 'Something Borrowed, Something Blue,' a CD which features a mix of Americana, blues, folk and 'selected obscurities.'
Photograph by Kathy De La Torre
Back in Tune
Chris Ramey's music career has had many twists and turns
By Carlos Castillo
For every successful band, musician, or singer, there are probably a 1,000 Chris Rameys: talented journeymen performers who had a taste of fame, yet were unable to make the jump into the higher echelons of the music industry.
Now, at 52, after years of playing too much--he wore out his throat at one point--and playing too little--he once quit music for 10 years--Ramey is attempting to jump start his career with a new collaborator and a new CD.
Ramey lives in Los Gatos, renting an in-law unit behind a house owned by restaurateur John Hannegan. Hannegan was the manager at Mountain Charley's when Ramey used to sing and play his guitar at the club in the early 1980s.
Ramey recently soaked up the midday sun near Hannegan's swimming pool, a pack of Marlboros at the ready. He was recovering from playing as a solo act at a two-night gig in Lewiston, a small town in Trinity County. Ramey had played five hours each night, instead of his usual four, and his voice was the worse for wear.
"I was having a good time and I overdid it," Ramey says hoarsely.
Chris Ramey strikes a pose as a 14-year-old model. Soon after, he ran away from home. At one point, when he was on the streets without identification, Ramey went into a bank to cash a check from a lawn-mowing job. The bank was displaying a 7-foot version of the posed shot that helped to identify Ramey.
Photograph courtesy of Chris Ramey
The beginning of The Kid
It has been a long road through the pop culture landscape for Ramey, whose family moved to Santa Clara in 1957. Their home was near Pruneridge Avenue and Lawrence Station Road (now the Lawrence Expressway). Orchards were still plentiful in the area, but technology companies were already becoming a presence. The Rameys lived near the Hewlett-Packard plant, where Ramey's dad Simon worked as an engineer.
As a teenager in the early 1960s, Ramey saw a performance by Jesse "Lone Cat" Fuller at the Off Stage, a coffeehouse on S. First Street in San Jose. Ramey embraced the finger-picking guitar playing of Fuller, who played "delta," or "country," blues.
Fuller's moniker came from the variety of instruments he played, including a "fotdella," a percussion and bass instrument that Fuller fashioned from the guts of a piano that he played with his foot. Fuller also played an electrified 12-string guitar, a harmonica suspended by a coat hanger around his neck, cymbals and a kazoo.
"I saw him and that's when life became complicated," Ramey said about Fuller. "I wasn't black, had no blues background, everything I learned was the kind of folk music off the recordings of the Kingston Trio."
After seeing Fuller, Ramey bought a guitar and, in the blues tradition, replaced the nylon strings with steel ones. Only about 15 years old at the time, Ramey began making a name for himself as a performer on the local coffeehouse circuit, where folk music was taking on more of a "protest element," Ramey says.
"I sang kind of pretty," Ramey recalls. "I had a minimal amount of guitar, but I could handle the lyrics, get the song across. I was called The Kid."
Photographs by Kathy De La Torre
Chris Ramey demonstrates the finger-picking style of guitar playing made famous by country blues muscians.
Ramey said he was often second on the bill for acts such as (Jerry) Garcia and Pigpen, who would eventually dye their blues roots Day-Glo and become acid-rock pioneers with the Grateful Dead.
Ramey recalls playing at the Brass Knocker, a coffeehouse on Big Basin Way in Saratoga that could only accommodate about 15 people. The clientele tended to be "high school kids who wanted to be a little more grown-up than they really were," Ramey says with a laugh.
At about the same time his music career was developing, Ramey ran away from home. "There was a little bit of drinking going on," says Ramey, but he takes most of the responsibility for his flight. "I don't want to put too much blame on the folks," Ramey says. "I was antsy."
Ramey ran away to San Francisco, then headed to Lake Tahoe, where he roomed with Skip Spence. He and Spence, who later became a drummer for Jefferson Airplane and founded Moby Grape, worked as a duo before Ramey eventually reunited with his family.
Just as the Bay Area music scene was beginning to provide the sounds that would eventually help define a generation, Ramey found himself on another continent.
Chris Ramey (left) stands next to Japanese folk singer Mike Maki, as they prepare to perform at the Nichi Geikei, a concert hall in downtown Tokyo, sometime in 1965. Ramey was about 17 at the time. On the far left, in shadow, is the elevator that took the performers to the main stage.
Photograph courtesy of Chris Ramey
Made in Japan
After Ramey, who was still a minor, moved back home, his father was assigned to a job in Japan. Upon arriving in the foreign land, Ramey again struck out on his own. He got an apartment, attended high school a few hours a day and worked as a model for Van Heusen shirts and Honda motorcycles.
"They liked tall, skinny Americans," says Ramey, who has since developed a stouter frame.
While walking around Tokyo with his guitar case one day, Ramey happened into a club featuring a popular Japanese country-and-western act. He was given permission to play a set and, afterward, somebody in the audience offered to help book him at other venues.
Small venues gave way to larger ones and Ramey eventually found himself playing in front of 5,000 people. "They'd bring me up on a hydraulic lift onto the stage," Ramey recalls. "I had never worked with such high-tech stuff."
While in Japan, Ramey says that he was offered a recording contract by RCA, but turned it down. "I heard that if you blew your first shot out, then it's gone, so I didn't take it," Ramey says. "I probably should have, then I would have had a product."
Chris Ramey belts out a song at the Nichi Geikei, a concert hall in downtown Tokyo. His trademark attire, at the time, included his white jeans.
Photograph courtesy of Chris Ramey
Back in the states
Meanwhile, in the Bay Area, guys Ramey had played with had gone on to form successful bands. Ramey had learned his playing style from Jorma Kaukonen, who had become a member Jefferson Airplane. "He was the best fingerpicker in the area, at that time," Ramey says.
After about a year in Japan, Ramey arrived back in the United States, to discover that the coffeehouses had given way to bars as the primary venues for the local music scene. The music had changed, too. "Folk music had become folk-rock and rock, "Ramey says.
About the only jobs for a folk act was on the "steakhouse circuit," places like Chuck's in Los Altos. "If you wanted to try and make a living out of it," Ramey says, "they were the only ones who could pay."
Ramey had moved into a house on Laurel Road in Beardsley Canyon, in Los Gatos. Rent was $64.50 a month. The owner offered to sell the house to Ramey for $6,700. "It might as well have been $60 million at that point," he recalls. "Money was hard to come by."
To makes ends meet, Ramey took his single act on the road, playing Cape Cod for three months, then heading to Colorado ski resorts, such as Vail, Breckinridge and Copper Junction, in the winter. "There was always work, if you were willing to get in some old car and get out to it," Ramey says.
Photograph courtesy of Chris Ramey
Ramey performs under a spotlight at an unknown venue in Japan.
The Telepathic Kid
Upon returning to the Bay Area, Ramey also discovered changes that extended beyond music. He had experimented with drugs before going to Japan and returned to find them in greater abundance. "Japan was rather dry in that area," Ramey says. "You were lucky if you could find any weed. But coming back, and there it was, it kind of became a lifestyle."
During this time, Ramey had another brush with fame. He began hanging out with the Merry Pranksters, a group founded by author Ken Kesey. The pranksters believed they could achieve a state of spiritual enlightenment by taking psychedelic drugs, especially LSD.
Every prankster had a nickname and Ramey's was the Telepathic Kid. "I was instinctively not going to hang around, if something bad was about to happen," Ramey says.
Even though Ramey's involvement with the pranksters was immortalized in Tom Wolfe's book, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he now has mixed feelings about the experience. "I felt on the outside of it, even though I was there. [The pranksters] had been doing their thing for a while and I wasn't really sure what they were doing," Ramey says. "I was intrigued by it, but I was still a kid.
"There was an awful lot of LSD being taken," Ramey recalls. "A lot of people, including myself, made a couple of bad judgments Some people never came back off of it. Some did. I got through it, so I say it was a good thing, in a way. But, it leaves its scars."
Ramey continued his music career, including a stint as a member of the Chocolate Watch Band, a rock group. He performed with folk and blues singer Kacey Jones, "a local girl," from 1969 to 1971. In 1972, Ramey became a backup guitarist for country folk artist Tom Jans. Jans had penned the hit song, "Loving Arms," which was recorded by Elvis Presley and James Taylor. Ramey says that he and Jans eventually became a duo and played together for about 1 1/2 years.
After he and Jans split up, Ramey played local hangouts around the Bay Area, including Mesa's (owned by Johnny Mesa, who now has the Northside Grill), Mountain Charley's and the Grog and Sirloin (now Double D's) in Los Gatos.
But the wear and tear of working seven and eight jobs a week began to take its toll.
"I'd be doing a wedding, a cocktail hour in San Francisco, then blasting from there into another job that night," say Ramey, who developed polyps on his vocal cords. "Eventually, I did wear my throat out to where I couldn't even play one night a week."
He finally quit music cold turkey. "I spent 10 years off where I didn't even really own a guitar," Ramey says. He tended bar, then became a car salesman in 1985, for a time, at Larry Hopkins Honda in Sunnyvale.
"I thought, 'What could I do that would pay the bills and not cause massive amounts of brain damage?' I picked automobiles, which did cause massive amounts of brain damage," Ramey says with a laugh. "It was a very difficult job. They were the hardest hours I've ever worked."
Photographs by Kathy De La Torre
Chris Ramey and Jim Dewrance at the home studio of Dale Barcellos, where Ramey's CD, 'Something Borrowed, Something Blue,' was mixed.
One more time
In 1999, Ramey was easing back into the music scene, although he was still selling cars. During a show in Sunnyvale, Ramey was introduced to harmonica player Jim Dewrance. The two hit it off and found that their musical styles meshed. "I got him into some folk things and he got me into some blues things," Ramey says, about teaming with Dewrance.
Even though he performed mostly folk and gospel material in the early days, "through the years, the blues slowly crept in," says Ramey, who is now thought of as primarily a blues singer.
Ramey and Dewrance recently collaborated on a CD titled Something Borrowed, Something Blue, which features songs written by Ramey, Bob Dylan, Tom Waits and Jesse Fuller, among others. "They are songs I've been playing for a long time," Ramey says. "I'm glad to have put these songs to bed."
Ramey took a minimalist approach in conceiving "Something Borrowed, Something Blue." The songs feature only three players: Ramey, Dewrance, and Richard Schmidt on bass. "The simplicity is more than acceptable," says Ramey.
The cover of Chris Ramey's CD features a coffeehouse that used to be in the North Beach area of San Francisco. Ramey auditioned acts there in the late 1960's.
Photograph courtesy of Chris Ramey
Ramey and Dewrance say they made the CD as a calling card to the music industry. Ramey hopes to eventually land a manager. "When you walk into a place, you might be able to work the room as good as anybody, but you can't go in an tell them that yourself," says Ramey. "You have to have a second person come knocking for you.
"My job is the music aspect of it, not to drag myself all over the countryside or be on the net all day long," adds Ramey. Nonetheless, Ramey has a website where he sells custom-made bottleneck slides--for sliding over the fingerboard of a guitar--from wine bottles "mined at the back doors of the fine restaurants of Los Gatos."
The CD is being distributed on the Internet through Nashville-based Kinkajou Records, partly owned by his old playing partner, Kacey Jones.
But Ramey, accompanied by Dewrance, still plays the local honky tonks. During a recent gig, Chris and Jim are forced to compete with a table full of loud, obnoxious customers. "All right, Jim, let's do something noisy," says Chris as he launches into "Hesitation Blues."
Photographs by Kathy De La Torre
Jim Dewrance gets ready to blow a tune on his harmonica. 'The blues was the grunge of the '60s.' he says.
Later, while Ramey sips brandy during a break in the set, Dewrance acknowledges that sometimes musicians find themselves in less-than-ideal circumstances. "You just play for yourself," says Dewrance, a mellow 43-year-old who also fronts the Jimmy Dewrance Blues Band.
After the gig ends, Dewrance stows the gear, while Ramey stands at the bar and nurses a cold with a glass of brandy. Dewrance sells a copy of Something Borrowed, Something Blue to Debra Harville, who introduced Ramey to Dewrance.
"You guys sound good," says Harville, who performs with her husband Mark as the Harvilles.
"I think they'll be around a long time," says Debra of the pairing of Dewrance and Ramey. She recounts the time Ramey refurbished her mother's Hawaiian guitar and relates stories she's heard of Ramey's storied past.
"I've seen newspapers clippings of this guy in Japan and he was a big star."
Chris Ramey and Jim Dewrance will appear at the Red, White and a Little Blues Festival at noon in downtown Monterey May 26. To obtain "Something Borrowed, Something Blue" online, contact Kinkajou Records on the Internet at www.kinkajourecords.com. For information on Chris Ramey's bottleneck slides or to get on his mailing list for upcoming performances, go to www.wininboy.com. To obtain "Too Gone Blue" by the Jimmy Dewrance Blues Band, go to www.cdbaby.com.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
