Michael Cannon

Michael Cannon is one of the patriarchal figures of this community. His vision, energy, and talent has been a major force in the evolution of the the Chico music scene and sub-culture. He and few other young pioneers helped to organize a group of folks known as the Butte Creek Family. They lived and continue to live an alternative lifestyle, working and playing together. As you'll read here Michael is the founding member of the Butte Creek Family Band and was an original member of Spark & Cinder. He's still as busy as ever with the incredible Irish band, The Pub Scouts, which can be heard every Friday at 4:00 at Duffy's Tavern in Chico.

Michael...I grew up in Burlingame, California. Great suburban middle-class community. Great place to grow up. Lots of sports. Played sports my whole life. I started playing the piano when I was seven. My grandmother graduated from the Boston Conservatory of Music and happened to live right next door to me. We used to have the little neighborhood gang taking classes from her and doing the semi-pressure-filled recitals about once a month.

So you learned to read music at an early age.

I learned to read, but I think the thing with my grandmother was she taught me how to memorize.

And to play by ear?

To play by ear and memorize. When I got up to college I had a repertoire that tickled the girls' fancies down in the room at the dorm.

What year did you graduate from high school?

1967.

Were you going to the Fillmore in those days?

Oh, absolutely! I saw the Grateful Dead at Marx Meadows in '64 or '65. I was down in La Honda when the Beatles met the Merry Pranksters that infamous Saturday afternoon.

Wow, you were there when that happened and saw the Beatles?

Yeah.

Holy Shit! What a red-letter day!

Yeah, that was a fun day. We had just heard by word of mouth that there was gonna be this scene down in La Honda and sure enough it was just like Haight Ashbury.

It was at Ken Kesey's place?

Yeah, well it was right down there by Boots and Saddles in La Honda. Boots and Saddles was a bar that ended up burning down about ten years ago. In fact, Spark & Cinder played two or three times.

So you'd heard the Beatles were gonna be down there. Did you get to meet them?

No, no. It was just a huge, wild, crazy crowd scene.

And they were there, and you were there.

Yeah.

Fun! This must have been around 1965?

Yeah.

Was this an Acid Test event?

It was just a spontaneous gathering. Those things used to develop like that back then. The word would spread quickly. There was that whole scene down there.

Did you come directly to Chico to go to school?

Directly up. My dad gave me a ride up to Chico, dropped me off at the dorm and died three days later.

Ouch! What happened to him?

He was just sittin' in a chair watching the Watts riots I believe, and keeled over and was dead before he hit the floor. Heart attack.

Had you been caught up in the hippie thing by then? Were you a long-hair when you got to Chico?

Not at all. I played basketball. I got drafted out of high school to play ball at Linfield College in Oregon but decided to go to Chico State and partied. But played on an intrarmural basketball team that won it three years in a row.

Were you in a fraternity?

I was in the Lambda Pi fraternity. I lived at the Lambda Pi fraternity house that burned down on West Sacramento Ave in Chico. I participated in Pioneer Days before [former Chico State president] Robin Wilson destroyed it. The good 'ol days.

How did you come to buy property and move up into Butte Creek Canyon?

I was working over at the college as the dirctor of the Associated Students Day-Care Center where I met this lady, Darlene. She and her husband were Zen Buddhists. Through them and some other folks this opportunity came up to move to Butte Creek Canyon for six hundred dollars down and sixty dollars a month for ten acres with no electricty, no running water, no nothing.

But with creek frontage.

With creek frontage. The way it happened, there was this guy, Phil Fortier, who now is living on a piece of land out of Spokane, Washington. He was one of the origninal five people up there. He was also one of the origninal members of the Bat Wingers. He'd write poetry and hand 'em out on the street.

What were the Bat Wingers?

Well, the Bat Wingers were a loose connection of hippies that would stage public theater. They'd show up somewhere and do something totally outrageous and off-the-wall. People wouldn't know if it was really happening or a joke. Like what Bobby Seals used to do. He used to be a part of the Bat Wingers. You know, things like mock executions.

Ah, like Orson Wells' "War of the Worlds" on a local level.

Exactly. So Phil Fortier was one of the original five guys up on that land there. He had a 12'x8' shack. He says, "I will sell you, for five hundred dollars, my share of the land and you can have my 12'x8' shack." So that's what I did. I bought his share out and had one of the original five parcels on that ten acres. The parcel had been a one hundred and sixty-acre organic farm that was owned by a guy named Mr. Elliot, who was a great organic farmer, but a Nazi. So we overlooked his Nazi paraphernalia and his carrot patch. He was two parcels over from our original ten acres. That whole area, Helltown, that's where the Indians from the Cherokee and Concow area came down and were massacred. And there's a Chinese burial ground where the Chinese who'd just got done building the rock walls were lined up and shot. It has some fairly heavy vibes up there.

What year was it that you bought in?

This was April, 1971. We built four geodesic domes right there. We got the dome books, were reading Buckminster Fuller. We built four different geodesic domes. One of 'em was mine.

At this point were you beginning to embrace the hippie lifestyle?

I think when we got up into the woods there, things started to happen a little quicker in that regard.

Had you grown your hair out before this?

No. I went to Chico State for four years. Then, right after that, that's when we moved up on the land. It became a hippie-survivalist-organic gardening-commune kind of thing.

And all along I'm sure you were playing some music.

Yeah. I had the good fortune, while living in the dorm in 1967, to have roommate who was a guitar player. So when we moved out of the dorm we moved into a house with his buddy who was also a guitar player. He was a great Kingston Trio kind of guy. This guy actually played with one of the versions of the Kingston Trio. So I picked up the guitar, and in no time at all we were banging out chords and singing "Greenback Dollar" and stuff like that.

So you hadn't actually played guitar until that point?

No. But with the piano training it was just a matter of building up the technique on the guitar. The musical sensibilities were there.

So you're playing a little guitar with your buddies, and then what?

Then, just before I moved out to the land, we got hooked up with a loose conglomoration of people. John Lapado, Dennis Atkinson, Annie Hudson, Pat Cole, who is a local architect in town now and played banjo, and Michael Hart. Michael was one of the other original owners of the land up there. He was one of the original five and ended up playing bass with me for twenty years. So we started getting together whenever we could. Parties or get-togethers or whatever. Just playing. One day we were playing around the house and Dennis got a couple bottles of tequila and by the time we polished them off, we said Goddammit, we were going down to [local nightclub] Some Other Place and storm the joint, and they were gonna have to let us play.

S.O.P. Where was that?

It was right there around Second and Main. It was one store up from Zucchini and Vine on Main.

So you guys were starting to organize a little band at this point. Do you remember when you first came up with a name for the band?

The very first name was the Butte Creek Checker-Board Jamboree. Then, with the influx of people from who-knows-where and all over the world, we suddenly grew into the Butte Creek Family Band. A few people dropped out, like Dennis and Pat Cole, but it grew into the Butte Creek Family Band. One time we played at the Vecino Theater in about 1972 or '73 with seventeen people on stage.

Where was the Vecino?

The Vecino was at about Eighth or Ninth and the Esplanade. We had this huge group. Then, as I remember it, we started tightening up the music. We started to acutally work on tunes. It sort of left itself at that point where I split country in 1974.

Where did you go?

Well, I took off with a gal, Debbie Crumb. We were hangin' out for about three quarters of the year, and I decided, "Hey, do you want to go to Europe?" So we took off and we went to Vancouver and went across to Winnipeg. When we got to Winnipeg we had a friend there, and in the space of three days she had met another guy, who she ended up marrying and having a kid with, and I had met another gal who I ended up traveling around the world with, that I'm still friends with today. So this gal Katrina and I took off to the West Indies and lived on Antigua for three of four months and really got infused with reggae and calypso. That's where my reggae-West Indies bent comes from. Being down there hanging out with the black people. This was the winter of '74-'75. Then we came back and we immediatley get that version of Butte Creek Family Band together that records the first album. It took us a year and a half to do. It's still a classic up to this point.

I didn't know about that album.

Oh yeah, it's great. Steve Cook's on it. And Bruce from down in Malibu wrote alot of the tunes and Stevie wrote alot of the lyrics. I wrote two tunes on it. The music still holds up today.

Was this when everybody was getting into Guru Maharaji? And was this devotional music?

Yeah. While I was gone, before I went to the West Indies, I got the "knowledge" from Mahatma Rajiswar and Regina Saskatchewan at the suggestion of the gal that I was hanging out with, Katrina. So I came back from the West Indies really blissed out. I had to leave my girlfried in the West Indies but I had to get back. Little did I know that I was gonna impregnate a lady very shortly and have my son born in 1976. But I came back and worked on this album. Basically it was a premie band. [The followers of Guru Maharaji are called "premies"] There were other people in it, but it was Debbie Crumb, Stevie Cook, Ron Moroni, Barney Barber played in it. John Lapado ended up getting the knowledge. He wasn't in the Butte Creek Family Band but was around at that time. He had been in the original band before I left. Then when I came back we did more devotional music. All the music we did on the album was devotional.

Hadn't Marilyn [Cannon, Michael's future wife] been involved all along?

Oh, absolutely. She was the flute player all the way through.

So when you got back from the trip to the West Indies you and Marilyn got together?

Yeah, it was right when I got back from the West Indies that I hooked up with Marilyn, and that was that. So we're doing the devotional thing and we've seen the Supa Nova guys, we've hung out with them, we've taken acid with them, we were with their girl friends and vice-versa, and everything else. We knew Jack Straw. We always liked Jimmy Fay and Jerry Morano. There was that New Jersey rhythm section with Bill Baxmeyer, Jimmy and Jerry. I think it was that classic thing where California melody-chordal-hippies meet the New Jersey rhythm section. That became the band that played that very first gig. We called it the East-West Transcendental Spark & Cinder Band.

Where was that first gig?

The first gig was a Friday and Saturday night at the Odyssey. It was supposed to be just one gig. We were broke and we needed the money and that's all we were gonna do. But it went so well that we came in the next Tuesday for more rehearsal. Then it was "off to the races," the hottest shit in town.

I think I saw Spark at the Odyssey, but it was really Ray's Rendezvous where it was just unbelievable.

Ray's Rendezvous was where everything came into focus. We took it out of the "good-time hippie band," which was still very good, and turned it into the next level where we were playing some shit that was twenty years ahead of its time. There was a three year stint there at Ray's Rendezvous where we kicked ass for four or five hundred people night after night.

Didn't Butte Creek still have its own identity at this time?

Yeah. We were doing parallel gigs. Marilyn got pregnant so she dropped out of Spark & Cinder and wasn't available to Butte Creek either. The Butte Creek Band sort of petered out on its own after awhile.

And Phil O'Neill shows up at this point and takes over the woodwind duties.

Yeah, in Spark & Cinder's evolution that was a watershed mark. We'd had some horn guys before. I mean we had [very hot, local sax and flute player] Charlie Haynes, who used to play with us in the old days. We used to do gigs with Peter Berkow where Charlie Haynes would play with us too. So it's not like we hadn't had horn guys, but Phil showed up with a horn and a VAN to carry all the equipment.

So we're talking about the last couple of years of the seventies. Spark & Cinder is in their heyday. Phil comes on. Kim Cataluna's been in and out, Sam Yarbrough comes in and he's great. [For more on these singers see the Jerry Morano interview--K.G.]What else was going on in your life as far as the Butte Creek Canyon lifestyle and the parallel musical projects that came along which led to the Irish thing.

There was definitely alot of parallel music going on. We were living in the canyon and there were alot of musicians up there. We were sort of jamming all the time. There was alot of music happening with alot of different people. I think just from the fact that we were living up there that fiddle music started to emerge a little bit. As a commune we started to, I wouldn't say we were swapping wives, but there was this commune up in Oregon called the Magic Forest Farm. All of us used to go up there and all of them used to come down to our place. There was another commune, the Mountain Family, up in Concow. There was some swapping going on there, shall we say. There was like, a three or four-commune cross-fertilization going on. At the same time everyone was having kids and raising kids and trying to improve their situation monetarily and maybe knocking out a wall and putting in a couple more windows or doing other little things on their dwellings. So it was like, grow the gardens, raise the kids. There was just a little bit of a "nose-to-the-grindstone" attitude there.

Right about the time I quit Spark & Cinder [about 1985--k.g.] is when I got involved with Kids on the Mountain. That was with Vita and Phil from up in Concow. They were involved with the Mountain Family commune that we used to hang out with.

That was the other gang of Butte County folks that was doing the commune thing up in the hills.

Right. We started hangin' out together playing Irish music. Vita was a fiddle player and Phil played guitar. I found out after playing guitar and keyboards with Spark & Cinder for years that piano works really good with Irish music. I became the "vamper" with Kids on the Mountain.

Had you had an interest in Irish music already?

I think genetics has alot to do with it. My whole background being that I grew up with Kingston Trio stuff, and I was always attracted to bluegrass stuff too. I liked the "old-timey" stuff. Irish I'd never heard, so when I heard it for the first time it was like, "Oh yeah, this is good stuff, because you have to be a good picker to play it."

So there wasn't a big Irish music tradition in your family?

When I was growing up as a kid there was a huge Irish musical tradition, but it was New York Irish. I had two uncles that were world-renowned jazz piano players. One of my uncles played with Lou Waters for three years. So when my Irish-Catholic family got together it was nothing but piano playing and old tunes and singing.

What is the distinction between what you're calling New York Irish and traditional Irish music.

What I mean by New York Irish is stuff like all those Irish "singing" songs that the Irish immigrants in New York used to sing. "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling," and all that stuff.

Like what you'd think of as turn-of-the-century popular music in the "Bicycle Built For Two" era?

Yeah, it ran parallel with Dixieland and all that kind of stuff.

Right. The days when folks were all going out buying the sheet music and taking it home to the parlor. So at your family gatherings there was lots of that kind of stuff?

Right, and lots and lots of Dixieland piano jazz.

Which side of the family was this?

This was my dad's side.

Did your mom have a musical background too?

Her mother was the tremendous piano player that went to the Boston Conservatory.

So you had it coming from both sides of the family. When you first began to hear traditional Irish music it must have struck a familiar chord. When were you first exposed to that kind of stuff?

I was exposed to it probably over the radio and by just being at some jam sessions here and there in the early '70's. I heard the Bothy Band back in '72. They were probably THE seminal Irish traditional instrumental group, as opposed to a group like The Clancy Brothers which was more of a singing group.That was my first introduction to traditional Irish music.

So you were saying you had been hanging out with Kids on the Mountain playing Irish music. Didn't Kids on the Mountain play other types of ethnic music as well?

Yeah, we were doing some Yugoslavian music and we were doing alot of South American music. We did alot of Andes stuff like "Heart of the Inca Kings" and old-timey stuff. "Shady Grove" and lots of that old-time-singing-fiddle music. Classic folk, I guess you'd call it.

Was the Butte Creek Sextet going at this point as well?

Yeah, about 1984-85 we used to play the Ping Pong Palace alot. We opened up for Robert Cray there. The band had Jimmy Fay on drums, Michael Hart on bass, Steve Cook on guitar and vocals, Marilyn on flute, vocals, and sax; me on keyboards, and Phil LaRocca on percussion.

Had Phil been part of the earlier Butte Creek Family Band?

He came online right when the Sextet started.

Was he a premie?

Yeah, actually he was living in Quincy, and when I moved out of my dome to move into my tee-pee, I rented out my dome to him. That was before we had to condemn the dome because platform that it was built upon was faulty.

Well, it lasted a few years didn't it?

Yeah, I think it lasted about four or five years.

Tell me more about the Butte Creek Sextet.

Well, there was nobody else that had done or was doing that kind of thing, which was incorporating all the elements. We'd do tunes from Greece, we'd do Booker T's "Hiphugger," we'd do Motown, we'd do Western Swing, we'd do a Jerry Rafferty song. Just the full gamut. Everything from jazz to rock and everything in between. The song list was way cool.

How many years did that band go on?

I think that went on for three or four years. And then at that point I think you yourself hopped onboard.

I remember the phone call from you asking for Therese Chudy's phone number. It must have been about 1989 or so. We had Road Raisin going and she was our singer, but Road Raisin was sort of falling apart. (This was before the Steve Cook Band emerged out of that). But I'm saying, "Now, don't be taking my singer away, Michael." You had Sam Yarbrough slated to play bass and sing, but after a couple of days you called back and asked me to play bass so Sam could just concentrate on his singing. This made good sense because it gave you the Kim, Jimmy, Dana rhythm section that we had going at this point with the Blues Movers, which was very tight. I said, "Sure!"

That band was the real thing. You had the best musicians in Chico zeroing in on that Big Chill-Motown thing. Between Sam and Therese vocally it was chilling. The rhythm section was great, the song list was spectacular. I still have to this day, many, many, many, many people come up to me and say, "That was the best band I've ever heard in Chico."

Wow! Yeah, that was really fun. It also had that big horn section and great horn charts for those songs. The horns really gave the band that authentic sound.

It was the real thing.

That band lasted a couple years or so. I guess it folded around 1990 or 91, and that was it for Butte Creek.

You know I just watched the video of that last gig with Therese. It was at the Concow Faire. Joe Hammons played guitar, remember that? You're playing fucking bass, Jimmy on drums, we had J.D. and Scott Caddell on horns. We were doing "Oye Como Va, "Walkin' the Dog," "Strugglin' Man." It was like, boom, boom, boom. And that was it.

I remember many times during our band breaks we'd go outside and you'd have Irish music on your car stereo. So your interest in Irish music was starting to really expand during this time.

That's the stuff I was starting to listen to. And I was starting to actually search it out. So it was an embryonic thing in terms of finding the source of all the great tunes. When Butte Creek broke up there was a big void in my musical life. I knew what I wanted to do but I couldn't really put my finger on it. I had this sense that I wanted to get something together that was gonna be great for my next thirty years. I felt the gigs were drying up. I wondered how long I was gonna be able to this. I was wondering what else could be fun. It was almost like going back to the drawing board. Then there was that fateful evening about seven years ago when I went down to the Celtic Music Festival in San Francisco and saw Sharon Shannon playing the button accordion. It was like, "OK, there it is!" There wasn't a doubt in my mind. So I went home, bought my first accordion, got rid of that in about three or four months, and bought another one that I held on to for three and half years or so before I got my last one over in Ireland. I took a year off. My Uncle had just died and left me ten grand. He was the piano player that played with Lou Waters, who was always the hit at the family parties. I said "Uncle Jim, I'm doing this for you. You left me ten grand. I'm not gonna work for a year. I'm gonna play six to ten hours a day working on the accordion." After playing with Kids on the Mountain the tunes were already in my head. I went after those tunes first and learned that body of work just to get it up to a decent skill level. But things just started to explode after that. Andy Wilson started the Tuesday night sessions, which I've carried on for the last four years. He started them a year and a half before that.

Andy Wilson was a mandolin player and son of former Chico State President Robin Wilson.

Yeah, and God bless Robin Wilson. (We had the parade this year, Robin!) Anyway, Andy had the Tuesday night sessions. I would bring my accordion over there and we would play three tunes, five tunes, eight tunes. We'd try to play 'em around. We were just trying to agree on a body of work. That happened for awhile. Meantime, I'm just really practicing hard, just trying to get up to the skill level. Then I saw Sharon again the next year. And that was the first year she came up to Chico. It was just a spiral thing. I knew Dawn McConnel when she was six years old, used to bounce her on my knee. I'd see her down at the pub. I said, "Are you playing the fiddle?" She said she hadn't played in three years. I said, "Get it out!" Since then she's been playing with me in the Pub Scouts, she's been to the Willy Clancy Music School in Ireland, she's very good and she's winning fiddle competions. She's playing Irish music and having a great time. Ginger Vogel came to a session over at the Sports Club. We were just playing some waltzes around and a couple reels and a few jigs. Ginger shows up she starts getting really intense about it. Listening to her play now, she's fucking excellent. And running into Tatjana at the pub. She said, "Well, I started out playing classical music. I haven't played the fiddle in ten years." I said, "Bring it out!" And we have Bill Gibson. Here's my claim to fame: I've got Generation-X in my band. I've got aging hippies, like me and John. And I have one guy that fought at the Battle of the Bulge. Bill Gibson. He's seventy-one years old, rides his bicycle two hundred miles a week, and fought at the Battle of the Bulge, and is a wonderful friend and fiddle player.

So the Irish band has had many changes of name over the years.

Yeah. Kids on the Mountain kind of petered out after a couple of years. Then we had a flurry of names, like Smash the Windows and Jenny's Chickens. Then we settled on Reel Time for a couple of years until we found out there's probably about five bands around the world called Reel Time. So one day we had a gig in the Calistoga area and we had a day off. We took a cruise through Muir Beach and Point Reyes. Someone from the back seat said, "Where can we find that Inverness bar?" And another voice said, "We're scouting for pubs!" And Mary, our guitar player these days said, "We're the Pub Scouts!" We are the Pub Scouts.

And you still have the Tuesday night jams. Are they pretty wide open?

Yeah. People come in, you can see the format. Everyone's into like, teaching people. Love to bring people in. These sessions have spawned several other sessions where different combinations of the people who come to this session will go out and get some new people to play with. So the music is being spread geometrically. My private joke with everyone, and you're probably not going to like this, my goal was to put every blues musician in Chico out of work. I'm fifty percent there. That's my tongue-in-cheek joke. All you blues musicians out there, I love you.

It seems the bands that you've been involved with, some of which you've spear-headed yourself, have been a real important fabric of the culture of Chico. What do you feel your contribution has been to the culture and life-style of Chico?

Oh, it's immense! [Laughter] As John Lapado says, we've all got to give glory to God, but it's been fucking immense! I think the main thing is to always do what you like to do, and don't get mad--get even, and practice hard. If you want to do the musical thing, you can't be a slouch. And we all know who slouches are. What I've always tried to do is get on that cutting edge and not be a slouch.

I think that the geography of this area and a certain intangible magnetic draw has attracted a lot of very interesting folks here.

Maybe you and I hang out in one kind of world. Alot of other people hang out in different kinds. But my kind of world involves music. The people that I see like music and like that to be a part of their lives. So there's those people, and then there's everybody else. Everybody else has never heard of me, never seen me or anything. The people that know are the ones that know.

Chico's grown by leaps and bounds, so the people that do know make up a smaller percentage of the population.

Especially with Irish music. When Chico grows by a hundred persons one more person comes down to Duffy's and becomes a regular and watches that Irish music on Fridays.

And the other ninety-nine are all shopping at K-Mart.

Yeah, I'm not putting down Walmart 'cause I went there shopping the other day. It's just a very different culture.

I think the impact has been strong. It was you guys and the Jersey City guys who were really at the core of the whole hippie counter-cultural thing that began happening here so long ago.

Alot of things spawned out of there. Like Jimmy likes to say, "Man, we're responsible for hundreds and hundreds of babies getting born."