AADL Productions Podcast: Madcat Ruth

Thu, 09/03/2009 - 11:11am

Peter "Madcat" Ruth, a world-class harmonica player who's lived and played in Ann Arbor for over 30 years, celebrated his 60th birthday last April. We had the privilege of talking with Madcat about his varied career, which included lessons from Chicago blues harmonica legend Big Walter Horton; touring with Dave Brubeck; inventing the Madcat harmonica microphone; and winning a Grammy for his solo performance in Songs of Innocence and Experience. Madcat also reminisces about playing the many lost music venues in Ann Arbor and treats us with his signature harmonica rendition of "Take Five".

Transcript

• [00:00:10.04] AMY: Hi, this is Amy.
• [00:00:11.34] ANDREW: And this is Andrew, and you're listening to the AADL production's podcast.
• [00:00:15.95] AMY: Recently we had the opportunity to talk with Peter Madcat Ruth, a world class harmonica player living in Ann Arbor. Madcat looks back on a career that included private lessons with blues harmonica legend Big Walter Horton in Chicago, touring with jazz legend Dave Brubeck, and his experience living and playing music in Ann Arbor.
• [00:00:35.82] I wonder if you could tell us a little about how you got started playing the harmonica. I understand you found a harmonic that your dad had, and that you also heard a Sonny Terry record early on and this made a big impression.
• [00:00:46.98] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Right. Well it's kind of the other order. I heard the Sonny Terry record and I said, wow, I have to try that. And I knew my dad had a harmonica, he played it once or twice a year. And so I found his harmonica. Oh, I bought the record, by the way. It was -- I heard him on the radio. I heard Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee on a radio show in Chicago.
• [00:01:10.71] Then we got a record of, I think it was called Folk Music at Newport 1959, although it was 1964 when I got it, but I got the record and started playing along with the record and to my good fortune the key harmonica I had was b flat and if you inhale on a b flat harmonica you're in the key of f, and that's the key that Sonny Terry was playing in. And so, good luck, it sounded in the right key, it didn't sound dissonant or anything. I though, this is easy, so I kept playing.
• [00:01:47.15] ANDREW: You play lots of different instruments though, as well.
• [00:01:49.97] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Yes, I play, I started on ukelele, and then I took up guitar and then I took up harmonica. My harmonica playing improved faster than the other instruments so I'm mostly known as a harmonica play, but I still play guitar and ukelele, and a little bit of flute and penny whistle and [UNINTELLIGIBLE] harp and banjo.
• [00:02:10.29] AMY: You had also the great fortune of having private lessons from Big Walter Horton.
• [00:02:15.92] PETER MADCAT RUTH: That's right.
• [00:02:17.66] AMY: And that you also, to your deep chagrin, had told him that you wanted to play like Junior Wells.
• [00:02:22.21] PETER MADCAT RUTH: You've been digging deep. Yes, I did take lessons from Walter Horton and that was one of the more foolish things I've ever said in my life. To say to one harmonica player that you want him to teach you how a play like another harmonica player. It's all true. Those lessons were amazing, although Big Walter Horton wasn't a particularly good teacher. He could show me things, but he couldn't explain it. I mean, he didn't explain anything. He never said inhale on hole number two, or anything like that. He just would play something and then say you do it.
• [00:03:02.93] He wouldn't give me much information of how to do it, just he'd show me something and then ask me to do it.
• [00:03:11.52] AMY: Sometimes those are the best lessons.
• [00:03:12.90] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Yeah, it's kind of like learning how to swim by being thrown overboard.
• [00:03:18.63] ANDREW: Did you learn lessons from being taught in that way that helps you in your own teaching?
• [00:03:24.43] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Well, I don't do a lot of teaching. I have done some, though. I am more generous with the information I give out than he was. But still I teach by ear rather than by a lot of paper theory or anything.
• [00:03:45.65] AMY: I know that you've played with Dave Brubeck and also with his sons in various different incarnations. I'm wondering what that experience brought to your playing. I'm imagining the horn sections and the whole jazz avant garde experience changed you a lot?
• [00:04:04.73] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Dramatically. Yes I was primarily a folk music musician, and played some blues and that's where I was coming from. I met Chris Brubeck at a jam session in Chicago. I guess it was 1968. He seemed like a nice kid.
• [00:04:24.67] I'm three years older than Chris Brubeck, so now that I'm 60 and he's 57 it's no big deal. But when you're 18 and you're talking to someone that's 15, it seems like, oh he's just a kid. But still I knew, I could tell he was a great musician, even at age 15. And he said to me, in a couple years I'm graduating from high school and I'm going to start a rock and roll band and I want you to be in it. Sure. Wrote down my phone number and gave it to him and left and thought, well that was a fun kid, I'll never see him again.
• [00:05:06.31] Sure enough, two years later I get a letter forwarded to me, I was in New Mexico. It said, hey this is Chris Brubeck, remember me? I'm graduating from high school next month, and I want you to join my rock and roll band. Wow, yeah, I do remember him. What a trip.
• [00:05:28.64] So I hitch-hiked from New Mexico to Interlochen, Michigan where he was graduating from the Interlochen Arts Academy, and I joined his rock and roll band. Which was an amazing group. Everyone in the band was a classically trained musician. Everyone except for me, I was a folkie. But I could play harmonica and they couldn't, so I was in the band.
• [00:05:54.86] And I learned an incredible amount from my association with all the Brubecks, I was in Chris' band, and then Chris' brother, Darius Brubeck, I was in his band and then Two Generations of Brubeck, which was all the Brubeck brothers and Dave Brubeck. Toured all over the world and had to work hard to keep up and I hung in there for many years.
• [00:06:25.57] It was kind of fun, because they'd usually play in the first part of the show without me and then have me come on later in the show and it was kind of a show stopper, people thought --
• [00:06:43.75] ANDREW: Was it weird for jazz audiences?
• [00:06:45.31] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Yeah, well people didn't expect it at all. People thought that I was coming out to fix a mic or something, they thought I was -- I'd walk out and play harmonica. It was fun. It was fun to blow minds all over the world.
• [00:07:05.99] AMY: You had said that most of the stuff couldn't be played on one harmonica because it was too chromatic, so you'd stack up harmonicas. And some tunes you'd have a b flat harmonica, a d and a c, all stacked on top of each other. And then you'd find the notes you needed between the harmonicas that you had in your band.
• [00:07:21.62] You mean literally had them like --
• [00:07:23.37] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Yeah, right. I learned how to jump between them. And then I learned how to -- well, if you have two stacked up on top of each other, and you pull the bottom one out, the top one will come down into place. I could switch them very quickly that way. There is such a thing as a chromatic harmonica and I do play it a little bit, but I'm much better on the small, ten hole, diatonic harmonicas, so I prefer that method.
• [00:07:52.20] AMY: That means you must have a lot of harmonicas, in all different keys. How many do you have?
• [00:07:55.86] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Well they come in twelve different keys and so I have one in every key. And I have a spare in almost every key, and then I have some that are tuned higher or tuned lower. So usually when I go to a --any performance I have about 35 harmonicas with me.
• [00:08:11.94] ANDREW: What brought you to Ann Arbor?
• [00:08:13.72] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Chris Brubeck did. He graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy in 1969 and started that fall at U of M. And we communicated, we made a demo recording in the summer of 69, and then I went back college in the Chicago area, Lake Forest College. We communicated by phone and letter and in the following summer, 1970, I came to move to Ann Arbor to join New Heavenly Blue, that was his rock and roll band.
• [00:08:54.46] And we made a record on RCA records that summer, toured around Michigan, a little around the east coast.
• [00:09:03.47] AMY: Back in the day, there were some other venues in town, a lot, maybe a lot more than today. I was curious if you remember Joe's Star Lounge and The Second Chance and Mr. Flood's Party and some of those and if you have memories of playing there.
• [00:09:18.80] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Well, back in 1970, the place to play was the Big Steel Ballroom, and we'd play, that was on South Main Street, where the Firefly Club is now, except, in the same building but it was in the back. And we'd open for Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen over there. That was fun.
• [00:09:38.91] And then we'd do the free park concerts. They had free park concerts every Sunday in Gallup Park. That was before, I think Floods might have been happening, certainly Joe's Star Lounge wasn't open yet. It was before the Blind Pig opened. The Odyssey was another place with live music. I forget some of the other venues around town. They came and went over the years.
• [00:10:12.23] Then the Blind Pig opened, that was a great thing. They had blues musicians from Chicago, they'd get the musicians traveling between Chicago and Detroit to come over and play on Thursdays or Mondays. In their way between one city and another. That was a great blues scene happening.
• [00:10:37.46] In the late 70's, I started playing Mr. Flood's Party and played there quite often. That was a great place. A lot of fun. Four sets a night. Four 45 minute sets a night. That's when there was live music in, on the weekend, probably 20 places.
• [00:10:57.58] AMY: Did you pick up and play with other people or were you generally, at that time, with one group?
• [00:11:03.24] PETER MADCAT RUTH: When I was in New Heavenly Blue, I was only in New Heavenly Blue. And then I was in Sky King. When New Heavenly Blue folded up Sky King -- some of the ex-members started the new bands Sky King. New Heavenly Blue, by the way, had two albums, one on RCA, on Atlantic. And then folded, as most rock and roll bands do.
• [00:11:32.28] And then in Sky King we had a record on Columbia and then it folded as well. I joined the Darius Brubeck ensemble, which was playing avant garde jazz, really far out stuff. With a horn section at that point, I was -- Perry Robinson on clarinet and Jerry Bergonzi on saxophone, Chris Brubeck on trombone and myself on harmonica. Had a four part horn section which was pretty unusual selection of instruments. But I'm getting a little off track here, you ask about --
• [00:12:13.27] AMY: The different venues.
• [00:12:14.34] PETER MADCAT RUTH: The different venues in Ann Arbor. When I finally left the Brubeck, Two Generations of Brubeck, and moved back to Ann Arbor, I mostly played solo at that point. I had a band for a little, with a drummer name Muruga, who moved away but moved back. He's back in the Ann Arbor area. We had a trio for awhile but, most of the time in the late 70's and early 80's, I played solo shows playing guitar and harmonica and singing. I did a lot of shows at Mr. Floods, and later at the Blind Pig.
• [00:12:59.07] Then I had a whole series of duos and trios and quartets and then when they fell apart, I'd go back to playing solo again.
• [00:13:08.49] ANDREW: Do you always just go back and forth. Do you prefer playing in a group as opposed to playing solo, or do you just float back and forth between those two?
• [00:13:15.70] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Well, in the old days it was you did one thing, basically. And then over the years things have changed and all the musicians I know are doing multiple things. It's just the trend. I don't know. I mean there are people that just play in one band but, a lot of musicians I know plan in several groups.
• [00:13:36.35] AMY: What about the many specific memories you might have of the Art Fair and the Jazz and Blue Festival? Those sorts of --
• [00:13:46.74] PETER MADCAT RUTH: The first, when did they start? 1969 might have been the first Jazz and Blues Festival. I think I missed that one, then 1970, I went to that one. I might have my years wrong.
• [00:14:03.07] AMY: That's alright. We won't hold you to it.
• [00:14:05.51] PETER MADCAT RUTH: But I remember Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. A great time.
• [00:14:11.19] AMY: The Art Fair?
• [00:14:11.45] PETER MADCAT RUTH: The Art Fair, yes. The Art Fair. Early on they had a great, beautiful stage called the Graceful Arch Stage, on East University. I played there many, many years. I'm not sure what happened to the Graceful Arch Stage, it got away. But it was really fun, it was an annual tradition to get a band together and play.
• [00:14:37.99] Also, that was about the time that Joe's Star Lounge opened. Joe Tiboni, who used to manage the groups at Mr. Flood's Party started his own Joe's Star Lounge. My band, the Madcat/ Brubeck Band was opening act. We did get a lot of great music there. Particularly I remember Los Lobos, I had always heard about this wild band from Los Angeles. And, wow, were they great. Joe's was a pretty tiny place. To hear such an amazing band in such a tiny place was great.
• [00:15:19.41] The other place that I played very often was The Ark, I forgot to mention The Ark. I lived over about two blocks from The Ark, and I'd go there, they'd have open mic every Wednesday. So when I was in town, I'd try to go there every Wednesday. Free show. It was great. I'd play there and I'd meet people and then I got to be the harmonica player in residence, and so when people came through I'd sit in with them because I got a reputation of doing all right. Not messing up.
• [00:15:59.57] I met Rosalie Sorrels there, I still do shows with Rosalie Sorrels, 30 years later. Did shows with Steve Goodman, and, oh my goodness, Paul Siebel, Paul Jeremiah. Lots of folks that came through. David Bromberg.
• [00:16:16.23] AMY: I think it was at Top of the Park, maybe about 10 or 12 years ago or something, it was either there or the Art Fair, I can't remember which, but I heard you play I am the Walrus, on solo, and it was hypnotic, it was really great.
• [00:16:32.26] PETER MADCAT RUTH: I was probably playing with Andy Bowler at the time, a keyboard player who was in The Ovations. He and I had a duo version of I am the Walrus which was pretty out there.
• [00:16:45.37] AMY: So what do you think of John Lennon's harmonica part in Love Me Do?
• [00:16:49.95] PETER MADCAT RUTH: It's just right for the song. It's pretty basic stuff. People ask me what I think about Bob Dylan's harmonic playing. It fits the song. Neither one of them were very advanced harmonica players, but the fun thing about harmonica players, you can play it simply and it sounds simple, but it sounds appropriate. Sometimes. Sometimes.
• [00:17:19.41] ANDREW: How has the music scene changed in Ann Arbor over the years that you've lived here?
• [00:17:24.25] PETER MADCAT RUTH: When I first moved here, live music was king. There was music everywhere. I think what changed is insurance laws or something. People love live music now and then, but it became more difficult for bar owners to have live music, because of liability laws, insurance things. When I started there might be, there might have been as many as 40 places with live music on a weekend. It just, it was all over the place. And little by little that changed. And also, that's what people did for entertainment then. Go out to hear some music or you can stay home and watch three TV stations, and there wasn't any -- or go to a movie. You can go to movies, stay home and have your choice of three stations or go our for live music, so a lot of people did.
• [00:18:37.78] ANDREW: Why do you think that's happened? That we've lost the vogue for live music? Is it because people are used to hearing recorded music and seeing it on television?
• [00:18:47.95] PETER MADCAT RUTH: There's more opportunities to entertain yourself in other ways, other than live music now. There's so many ways. You can find all sorts of great music on your computer without leaving the house. Turn on YouTube and find amazing things. That eras kind of gone. There's still a place for live music. Wonderful stuff. Live music is best, that's what the musician's union says.
• [00:19:27.77] AMY: Can you tell us about the Shaker Madcat Microphone?
• [00:19:33.04] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Yes. I invented, I think in 1968 I guess, I invented a little microphone. I took apart a tape recorder microphone, and put it on a ring and put a volume control on a watch band. And I had this little microphone that was great for harmonica. Just perfect for harmonica, I thought. While a lot of other harmonica players were using this old green bullet mics about the size of baseball, I was using this really tiny little thing and it had a great sound, and I got used to it.
• [00:20:19.33] I'd show it to different people. Most people thought well, that's cool, but it's not traditional. If we're going to sound like Little Walter, we need to have a harmonica mic like Little Walter, even though he used all sorts of different things. The idea, though. All traditional harmonica players were using these harmonicas designed in the late 40's, so why shouldn't they.
• [00:20:44.67] Anyway, I designed this little mic and then for years I worked on making it better. No one much was interested. People'd say, oh you should patent that. I never did because I would've spent a lot of money and have a patent on a mic that no one uses. Eventually I met this guy who actually made harmonica mics, and he had a company called the Shaker Harmonica Company, because the first ones he made looked like salt shakers. I showed it to him and he thought it was a great idea, so he started making them. He took my design and made some improvements on it.
• [00:21:38.05] But since it was basically my design to start with, it's now called the Shaker Madcat Harmonica Mic. And it's available. People can get them and they're wildly unpopular. [LAUGHS] Dozens are sold every year, maybe a hundred a year. It might be a hundred. I'm not growing rich on this project, but it is available and it is the best harmonica mic in the world.
• [00:22:14.09] The way my microphone works is the harmonica is basically right there in inside my hand. But you don't have to hold onto it, so this is hand is still free to do all that wah-wah stuff. So if I go [HARMONICA PLAYS] is ooh ah ooh ah, and it picks all that up because you're not really holding onto it, it's just there. There's a volume control on the back -- it used to be on a watch band, but now it's on the back of my fingers. So I can actually change the volume control while I'm playing. It balances between the volume control and the microphone, it fits right in here now. When I play through an amplifier that's what I use, playing through a guitar amplifier.
• [00:22:58.96] But now that I'm playing acoustic, I mostly just play through an acoustic microphone. Or just a vocal microphone. And do all that hand stuff in front of the microphone, because the hands are real important to playing harmonica. But if you don't use your hands, you can get something like this. [HARMONICA PLAYS] And with your hands [HARMONICA PLAYS]. There's so much more coloration with your hands.
• [00:23:31.25] ANDREW: It seems to be the case with your music, and certainly with the microphone, that you're very aware of the tradition of things, but you're willing to pick up and use just about anything that's around.
• [00:23:44.63] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Absolutely correct. I love traditional music and I love to bend the rules. And combine things. I especially like taking traditional music and influences from all different sorts of traditional music and blending those together. Which is what musicians have been doing for centuries anyway.
• [00:24:07.90] AMY: I like what Dave Brubeck said about you, he's into music without categories. You've played with groups, Brazilian [UNINTELLIGIBLE] as well.
• [00:24:16.74] PETER MADCAT RUTH: I've made I guess 11 tours of Brazil now. It's been great. When I'm there I'm mostly playing Chicago blues.
• [00:24:26.55] AMY: You always come back to the blues, don't you?
• [00:24:28.20] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Yeah, I love blues. Yeah.
• [00:24:29.83] AMY: Do you then play mostly a blues scale, by and large, minor pentatonic scale mostly, or do you go off?
• [00:24:39.22] PETER MADCAT RUTH: I stretch it out. I don't limit myself to, I like the sound of blues. When I first heard the Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee stuff. Wow, that's great. And then I heard Little Walter, and Junior Wells and Muddy Waters.
• [00:24:54.28] I was living right there in Chicago and all these great Chicago blues musicians who had their roots in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana. But were playing in Chicago. Somehow that music spoke to me more than any other kind of music. What I tend to listen to is -- well I listen to everything. I keep my eyes, my ears opens to all sorts of music, but the stuff I keep going back to is American blues, mostly recorded before 1970. That's my favorite stuff. 1920 to 1970. There's a good fifty years there, that my favorite stuff was recorded.
• [00:25:39.11] Although my favorites stuff is what I'm doing. Which is based a lot, strongly on that.
• [00:25:49.27] [HARMONICA PLAYS]
• [00:26:46.25] ANDREW: Where did you get your name from? Madcat?
• [00:26:48.30] PETER MADCAT RUTH: It was a high school nickname. I went to high school in Park Ridge, Illinois. Main South High School. Where Hillary Rodham Clinton went to school. I didn't know her. We were actually in the same school, at the same time, for one year. I was a sophomore and she was a senior. I never met her at all. That's not surprising I didn't meet her. It was a big school, about 4,000 students.
• [00:27:19.87] Of those 4,000 students, I found the people that liked blues, there was about five of us. [LAUGHS] Most of folks at this school were unaware of blues. They were listening to the Beach Boys. And the Rolling Stones, even though in 1967 they didn't realize the Rolling Stones were playing blues. But I was loving blues back then. And right there on the A.M. radio, after midnight, you could pick up the deepest, most wonderful blues.
• [00:28:00.33] There's only these five students and myself that knew about it. We found each other, somehow. And the people we were listening to were so deep. There was Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, and Lightnin' Hopkins, and Sunnyland Slim, and Pinetop Perkins and, hey, they all had cool names. Wow. So we figured we needed cool names, too.
• [00:28:34.78] So there was, of these musician friends, there's Big Boom and his brother Red Boom. Sunnyland [? Seidenberg ?] and Magic Stan and I was Madcat. It was just this joke name. No one really called, it was just -- a bunch of your friends, kind of a silly nickname. But I was Madcat, I thought that was a cool name.
• [00:29:04.95] So that was 1966 probably, that that name came into being. And it wasn't until I met Chris Brubeck and joined his band, 1969, that I joined the band New Heavenly Blue, the drummer's name was Peter Bonisteel, he still lives in the area. But he was Peter. So to avoid confusion, they said you want to have a nickname or anything? Oh yeah, you can call me Madcat. When I moved to Ann Arbor in 1970, and I didn't know anyone except the members of the band. They all introduced me to their friends, this is Madcat, he just moved here from Chicago.
• [00:29:55.02] So I arrived in 1970 and I was introduced as Madcat. From the band stand, this is Madcat, he's from Chicago, he plays harmonica. What was just a silly nickname amongst five friends became who I was when I moved to Ann Arbor.
• [00:30:22.03] ANDREW: I was wondering, you came at the blues from folk music, whereas a lot of people come to the blues by listening to rock and roll, and then figuring out that rock and roll comes from the blues. Do you feel like coming at it from those different sides gave you a different perspective on the blues?
• [00:30:35.69] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Yes. Definitely. Not a wildly different perspective, but yes, definitely a different perspective. Because a lot of those people that came to the blues through rock and roll, then traced it back to Muddy Waters and that, but they never went further back than that. Where I was listening to this folk music and I got into the blues through Mississippi Fred McDowell and Mississippi John Hurt and Robert Johnson and people that were the people that preceded Muddy Waters. And we're playing acoustic music and then people like Muddy Waters were taking this acoustic music and turning it electric.
• [00:31:28.06] So the rock and rollers would trace it back just to Muddy Waters, but they wouldn't go back earlier than that. So I think I have a feeling for blues that goes back historically further and also a real appreciation for the acoustic sounds. So that's why, in my current group, Madcat and Kane, and also my very, very current group Madcat, Kane and Maxwell Street, which adds bass and drums, we play a very acoustic approach to the blues. Which is unusual.
• [00:32:10.54] Shari Kane and I will go to play in blues festivals every once in awhile. And everyone else will be playing electric instruments, and we'll be playing acoustic instruments. The audiences find it refreshing, I think, after a whole day of electric guitar and electric bass. To hear an acoustic instrument is kind of nice. Of course it's coming through a PA systems, so there's electricity involved.
• [00:32:38.10] AMY: On the other hand, you once played an entire performing of Jesus Christ Superstar where you played the saxophone parts on the harmonica. And you also won a Grammy for William Bolcom's piece. Which is a far field from the blues.
• [00:32:59.41] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Complete mind blower. Yes, I have a Grammy hanging on my wall and if you read it carefully it says, Classical Album of the Year. What? I got a Grammy for being a featured soloist on the classical album of the year. 2004 or something. Truth is stranger than fiction, isn't it?
• [00:33:23.84] ANDREW: Not someplace you thought you'd end up starting with Sonny Terry.
• [00:33:27.34] PETER MADCAT RUTH: Certainly not.
• [00:33:29.99] AMY: For more information on Peter Madcat Ruth, visit www.madcatmusic.net.
• [00:33:36.38] ANDREW: You've been listening to the AADL production's podcast from the Ann Arbor district library.
PETER MADCAT RUTH: People didn't think it was possible to do on a hand hold harmonica, but I was with Dave Brubeck for so many years, I had to learn how to play Take Five. [HARMONICA PLAYS]