AADL Talks To: Dave and Linda Siglin

Fri, 01/26/2024 - 12:54pm

When: October 19, 2023

In this episode, Dave and Linda Siglin talk about the history of Ann Arbor's beloved folk venue, The Ark, from its humble origins in a house on Hill Street to its thriving location at 316 S. Main Street. Dave and Linda reminisce about some of the famous national and regional talent that has played the venue; the evolution of the business; changes within the folk music industry; and the Ark's signature fundraising event, the Ann Arbor Folk Festival. 

Read historical articles about The Ark and the Siglins and the Ann Arbor Folk Festival.

Transcript

• [00:00:09] ANDREW MACLAREN: [MUSIC] Hi, this is Andrew.
• [00:00:11] AMY CANTU: This is Amy, and in this episode AADL talks to David and Linda Siglin, longtime managers of the Ark.
• [00:00:18] ANDREW MACLAREN: David and Linda share stories about many of the performers who have graced the Ark stage, changes in the music business, and the evolution of the Ark from a house full of students to a nationally known venue. [MUSIC] Let's start with the two of you. Are you from Ann Arbor? Did you grow up in Ann Arbor?
• [00:00:38] LINDA SIGLIN: We got married. We met at Eastern and we got married. We had Anya and we started at [OVERLAPPING].
• [00:00:45] DAVE SIGLIN: After we got married.
• [00:00:46] LINDA SIGLIN: Right. [LAUGHTER] Yes, but anyway, we started at the Ark when she was about 6 months old. We went from being in school to running the Ark.
• [00:00:59] AMY CANTU: What were you in school for?
• [00:01:01] LINDA SIGLIN: I was in school for art and art history.
• [00:01:05] DAVE SIGLIN: Theater directing and playwriting.
• [00:01:09] AMY CANTU: What brought you to the Ark first? Like, what was the first thing that brought you in the doors?
• [00:01:14] DAVE SIGLIN: I had, I played guitar and had starved in California, becoming non-famous for a year. Came back to Ann Arbor and I was working at Herb David Guitar Studios, and Jim Picker who ran the Ark at that time, this is in 1968, came in and said he and Annie, his wife, were leaving, [NOISE] and they were looking for a new manager and so I applied for the job.
• [00:01:49] ANDREW MACLAREN: Had you been at the Ark before? Had you performed there?
• [00:01:51] DAVE SIGLIN: I had no, I had never performed there. I had been there once. I saw the Prime Movers with the pop playing drums.
• [00:02:03] AMY CANTU: That's a memorable moment. Yeah, did you know right away, did you think, wow, this is for me, I can do this and I want to do this?
• [00:02:13] DAVE SIGLIN: Well, I had no other prospects and I thought, hey, I can do that for a while while I'm finishing up my Masters.
• [00:02:20] AMY CANTU: And Linda?
• [00:02:22] LINDA SIGLIN: I just came along for the ride. [LAUGHTER] I was the Ace in the hole, so to speak. I went along and thought we'd be there for a brief amount of time and we didn't leave till, well, we never really left, but we left the Ark proper, the building when she was 17.
• [00:02:41] ANDREW MACLAREN: This is the original Arc location. Which one?
• [00:02:44] LINDA SIGLIN: On Hill Street, 1421 Hill Street.
• [00:02:46] ANDREW MACLAREN: What was that building like? Was it a house?
• [00:02:50] LINDA SIGLIN: Yeah, it was actually a three-story mansion and the Arc proper was on the main floor and people sat on the floor and listened to music. The stage was just, a designated spot in front of the fireplace. The performers walked right through the people and stood on stage there. It was quite intimate and a lot of students, a lot of, just people, mostly the smarter ones came to the ark.
• [00:03:27] AMY CANTU: At the same time, there were other venues in town and folks use the Canterbury House.
• [00:03:32] AMY CANTU: Right. Can you talk about how it was different, or what you perceive now, as what it was difference?
• [00:03:39] DAVE SIGLIN: That, we had to figure out our slot. The Canterbury House hired the pop-folk stars, Janice Joplin, Joni Mitchell, Jack Elliott, Dave Van Ronk, all of those people who were quite famous at the time. We started out, Jim booked the opening weekend to give us a running start, we came to the Ark in October of 68 to apprentice. I mean, we just moved into the house. In fact, Anya celebrated her first birthday, and it if was from Norway, and so it was a traditional Norwegian birthday in full costume. It was like really cool. Sarah, Melton, Keller, and Christopher, and Sarah was what they called themselves, and they were actually in high school and they were the opening weekend and they were incredibly popular in Ann Arbor. I mean, he later became a session guitars in Nashville and she still performs and sings and it was [OVERLAPPING].
• [00:04:56] LINDA SIGLIN: In the libraries actually, for children's concerts, it's very nice. Yeah, she's quite good.
• [00:05:02] DAVE SIGLIN: It was packed. I mean, it was jam-packed. I mean, we started hiring people. We had performers on Friday and Saturday night, one performer, and they stayed there for the week, or until they were going to their next job. My first theory was they had to be as good as me. That lasted a few weeks, and then I realized no, they had to be better than me. Then in May of 69, Michael Cooney was performing, and Michael Cooney was probably the most famous unknown folk singer in the country. I mean, he would play a place and draw 40 people and then the next night he played, it would be jam-packed. He was really, really, really good. Well, he performed in February, and I remember he said, he got there early and we were just sitting around talking to get to know each other. He said, okay, where's my advertising? I said, right where is it? Because what did we know? I thought you know, they brought their own advertising. He said, no, that's not the way it works. He taught us how to make flyers etc. He was playing again in May, and all of a sudden, all these people came in during his second set. Well, Don McLean didn't come, and Pete Seeger didn't come. But they were all doing a benefit in Flint. It was Lu Killen, John Eberhardt, Andy Wallace, and a couple of other people. He saw them and he knew them. He called the king's ex. That was the end of the set and they walked off, took a break, and then they all came back on stage and they performed all night long. It really was incredible, Lu Killen was a phenomenal singer and he was very well known in England and Britain. He told this story, Rener Dine is a Vampire. In England, the vampire is a fox appears shape-changing fox to human. He told the story and then he sang this four-verse song, Rener Dine afterwards. It was just like, it just shut everything down. I mean, it was just like wow. I remember a lot of the singers in Ann Arbor were just going, this is where it's at. Wow, this is incredible. We immediately changed to doing traditional music and grassroots music right there. That was it. We knew the direction we wanted to go.
• [00:07:49] ANDREW MACLAREN: You said jam-packed. What does jam-packed mean at the time?
• [00:07:54] DAVE SIGLIN: Well, this was before we were given our.
• [00:07:57] LINDA SIGLIN: Capacity.
• [00:07:57] DAVE SIGLIN: Capacity by the city. It seems that it was either Friday or Saturday. I don't remember which one it was, but it was jam-packed. There are about 250 kids in there, and I mean they were students, so they were all thinner. As they got older, we had less, fewer people fit.
• [00:08:17] ANDREW MACLAREN: Was that the clientele was when you say students, high school students, college students, both?
• [00:08:21] DAVE SIGLIN: I would say upper-class students and graduate students.
• [00:08:26] LINDA SIGLIN: Some high school kids. Yeah.
• [00:08:31] DAVE SIGLIN: There were about 250 people there, and this woman came in and she see the main room with the fireplace, and then there was a huge arch going into a room. I talk with my hands. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:08:43] ANDREW MACLAREN: It's good for an audio medium.[LAUGHTER]
• [00:08:47] DAVE SIGLIN: Yeah I know. Directly opposite the stage, so if you look straight back, you see the second room and then off stage right was another room with a huge archway, and then between them was a huge archway going to the foyer where people came in, and she sat down right in the pathway. She was just blocking everybody, and I went up to her, and I said, excuse me, could you just move back a little bit, so that people can get through? I guess she complained to the fire marshal.
• [00:09:21] LINDA SIGLIN: It's all it takes. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:09:21] DAVE SIGLIN: That's all it takes and they set our capacity at 208 and made the church take out a window and put in a door for an exit and they had to put up a fire escape and it cost the church. It was sponsored by four churches. The Presbyterian church had to pay $10,000 for all of these improvements which they didn't appreciate at all and I guess they were letting the Ark use the building until they knew what they wanted to do with it. They had bought it from the family that had owned it. That set our capacity and gave us the direction, which was at that point fund raising because they withdrew their funding for the Ark, they let us use the building, but that was it for money.
• [00:10:13] AMY CANTU: How long were you there before the capacity was set and the church had to then pay all the [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:10:21] DAVE SIGLIN: I'd say a week and a half. [LAUGHTER].
• [00:10:24] DAVE SIGLIN: Two weeks.
• [00:10:25] AMY CANTU: Not very long, so then fund raising became. Right from the start, really?
• [00:10:31] DAVE SIGLIN: Yeah.
• [00:10:32] ANDREW MACLAREN: What form did that fund raising take in those early days?
• [00:10:37] LINDA SIGLIN: Asking the performers to, help out, not take pay, that thing. They were helpful doing that. David Bromberg did a lot, Michael Cooney, John Prime, a lot of people way back in the early days, and then that parlayed into working with the university and doing a big benefit at the Power Center for the Ark.
• [00:11:02] AMY CANTU: Was that when you got involved with the U of M office of major events or was this before then?
• [00:11:09] LINDA SIGLIN: Well, I don't remember.
• [00:11:10] DAVE SIGLIN: It was way before then.
• [00:11:13] LINDA SIGLIN: I went to work for them and then I worked for 25 years for the university, doing rock and roll.
• [00:11:20] AMY CANTU: Did you go to the community at all for funding or how did you?
• [00:11:24] LINDA SIGLIN: We did a lot of that.
• [00:11:24] DAVE SIGLIN: When we came the front room had tables and chairs and we got rid of those and kids sat on the floor, and you had a little pillow cushions or whatever. I don't even remember what was on the floor then, but for a fund raising concept, we figured out if you took a single bed mattress and sliced it lengthwise and then covered it with, I don't know, with a lore, whatever some material they could sit on it. You could get four or five people sitting on this mattress, and the fund raising, [LAUGHTER] if you gave I think it was $100.
• [00:12:01] LINDA SIGLIN: I think it was more like a grand.
• [00:12:04] DAVE SIGLIN: No, it couldn't be a grand then maybe two or 300, I don't know.
• [00:12:08] LINDA SIGLIN: See, we never did agree on money. [LAUGHTER] I thought it was 1,000.
• [00:12:12] DAVE SIGLIN: [LAUGHTER] I forgot his last name was Bob something or other. Do you remember his last name?
• [00:12:21] LINDA SIGLIN: Farrell.
• [00:12:22] DAVE SIGLIN: Bob Farrell absolutely. He was the first person who donated and so they embroidered his name on this cushion so you could sit on Bob and or he could sit on himself. [LAUGHTER].
• [00:12:35] LINDA SIGLIN: Charles Gelman, they bought a cushion, I remember years ago. He used to come there and sleep basically, Mr. Gelman did Charles, he would fall asleep. [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:12:45] AMY CANTU: Listening.
• [00:12:46] DAVE SIGLIN: He wasn't listening. His wife was.
• [00:12:50] AMY CANTU: Got you.
• [00:12:51] LINDA SIGLIN: It was great. [LAUGHTER] She said that was where he took his naps, I thought okay.
• [00:12:57] ANDREW MACLAREN: Why did the churches start doing this in the first place?
• [00:13:03] DAVE SIGLIN: Well, originally, I mean, that was a time when churches were doing coffee houses, so they decided, let's do a coffee house, and they got, what is it, First Presbyterian, North Side Presbyterian Campus Chapel, Calvary Presbyterian, and the Student Episcopal Foundation. We're all going to start this club, and then one month before they were going to open, the Student Episcopal Foundation broke off and they started the Canterbury House. That was big. That was very big. When I was hired, they explained to us we're not an evangelical organization. The Ark wasn't, they said it's a pre-evangelical organization. Which I thought, yeah whatever. What does that mean? [LAUGHTER]
• [00:14:02] LINDA SIGLIN: It's a sneaky way to get them. [LAUGHTER].
• [00:14:05] DAVE SIGLIN: They said think about as before, John the Baptist, I think that's what it was. We're here to listen to what the kids say, not to tell them what we think. It became a safe place for students to come and express their own ideas and I remember our board was the four churches, a minister from each church, a prisoner from each church and there was one woman, I forget what church she was from, but she said, I want to preach to these kids and the minister said, you're off the board which I thought was really cool.
• [00:14:47] LINDA SIGLIN: I can't verify any of that cause I never went to board meeting.
• [00:14:52] DAVE SIGLIN: You're lucky. Well, that was very good. To the Ark was the altruistic organization I had ever seen. It was there for no reason, except to supply a place for people to come and work out their own destinies.
• [00:15:08] ANDREW MACLAREN: When the churches departed the scene, you were able to just continue that mission. Nothing really changed it's just that you had to [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:15:19] LINDA SIGLIN: Correct we had to do massive amounts of fund raising at that point.
• [00:15:22] DAVE SIGLIN: Well, they didn't depart the scene. First Presbyterian Church just departed the money. The board remained and we had to figure out how to fund raise. The board stayed there until 1983.
• [00:15:38] AMY CANTU: It's long time.
• [00:15:40] DAVE SIGLIN: When it became apparent that we had to move and we had to reorganize, the board resigned and a new board was formed. Meanwhile, we got two community members onto the board during earlier than that, the community that came to the Ark was represented. At one point the Presbyterian church was going to close it down. Well, in any organization there's a few people that don't like something and a few people that love that. Most of the people don't even know about it. That was I'd say the First Presbyterian Church, most people, they didn't know what the Ark was, they didn't really care. But there were a few people that hated it and a few people that loved it. At one point, this guy came over and he was one of the people that hated it. We set up a meeting with them. We passed out little file cards for people to fill out. What does the Ark mean to you and they just wrote on it.
• [00:16:51] LINDA SIGLIN: It was very nice to see what the people had written. It was heart felt from it.
• [00:16:59] DAVE SIGLIN: Filled up a pillow case. I mean, just and Dick, whatever his name was, you probably remember his last name I don't. He came and he said, you have 10 minutes to convince me the Ark should stay here and Linda walked in and dumped this pillowcase full of file cards and he started reading them. She chewed him out for being rude. I remember that.
• [00:17:24] LINDA SIGLIN: Very aggressive person, youth does that to you. It allows you to be much more aggressive. Oh, actually as you get older, you can revert back to that though so it's nice.
• [00:17:38] DAVE SIGLIN: He became an Ark Supporter. I mean, he read these things. I mean, there were a few nasty ones like Norman Star who taught math at the university said I've been to the Ark. I've been to the first Presbyterian Church, I got a better show at the Ark, but I remember that one.
• [00:17:54] AMY CANTU: That's great.
• [00:17:55] DAVE SIGLIN: Yeah. But there were a lot of really nice ones, and people basically said, I come to the Ark because the music means a lot to me, or the people mean a lot to me, or this is my church. This is what I learned from. He became a supporter of the Ark after that.
• [00:18:21] AMY CANTU: Eventually then you had to look for a new space and how did you go about, how did that come about? Talk about that a little bit.
• [00:18:30] DAVE SIGLIN: Well, we had a community meeting.
• [00:18:31] LINDA SIGLIN: Desperation. It motivates you a lot of times.
• [00:18:37] DAVE SIGLIN: We asked everybody what they thought we should do. One person said you should quit and we should start a committee, run a club somewhere else. We went, thanks very much. Now, anybody else?
• [00:18:57] AMY CANTU: Never mind.
• [00:18:58] DAVE SIGLIN: I'm not quitting. They said let's move. We reorganized as a non profit, wasn't 501(c), because it takes a couple of years to get that as a nonprofit organization and we designed a membership and we moved to 637 and a half South Main, which had been boards and billiards, and before that it was a harpsichord repair shop.
• [00:19:30] AMY CANTU: What year was this?
• [00:19:31] DAVE SIGLIN: 1984.
• [00:19:38] DAVE SIGLIN: I remember Don Rumelhart used to play bridge there. Boards and billiards was for bridge tournaments and for billiards tournaments. He said he used to play bridge there and he used to come to the Ark and listen to bluegrass.
• [00:20:04] LINDA SIGLIN: He and Judy, his wife, donated a lot of money to help the Ark keep going, so that was very helpful.
• [00:20:15] DAVE SIGLIN: Judy was amazing. She came walking into the Ark first time we ever saw her. Well, I had known her from before when I directed Uncle Vanya at the Civic Theater. She came walking in in this fur coat and just dropped it on a chair and then went and got some coffee and popcorn and stuff and mingled with everybody and I thought, wow, [LAUGHTER] that is cool.
• [00:20:42] LINDA SIGLIN: I moved it right away. I thought a nice student might decide it was a warm coat [LAUGHTER] for the winter. I thought, what, is she nuts? [LAUGHTER] I put it in the closet for her.
• [00:20:56] AMY CANTU: They were great supporters of the arts in the city. Talk about that first location. How did you set it up? How did you want it to be different from the original and eventually you got a liquor license [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:21:11] DAVE SIGLIN: You mean, the new location?
• [00:21:12] AMY CANTU: The new location on Main Street.
• [00:21:13] DAVE SIGLIN: Well, performers couldn't stay with us. The thing about Ark 1 was that we got to know the performers really well. Leon Redbone, when we first hired him, came and stayed for several months uninvited, and we didn't know how to say when are you leaving. But he was the perfect guest. It had had a lot of rooms in it, so he had his room, and he just stayed there. We went to see Song of the South twice at a drive and because he loved the music. We had two conversations. One was whether fleas had wings. He thought they had wings. I said no, they have very strong hind legs and they jump.
• [00:21:57] LINDA SIGLIN: It was weird. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:21:59] DAVE SIGLIN: Then he gave Linda a lecture on smoking as he's smoking a cigar because he thought cigarettes were bad for you. Other than that he didn't talk much at all.
• [00:22:08] AMY CANTU: Did he practice while he was there?
• [00:22:10] DAVE SIGLIN: I don't know.
• [00:22:10] AMY CANTU: Play. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:22:12] DAVE SIGLIN: He stayed by himself, and then after two months, I heard somebody going down the side steps out to the driveway, and I went to the top of the stairs, and there he was, he had his hat, his cane, and his suitcase, or his umbrella and his suitcase. He went out the door and I went to the door, and he was getting in a cab and he turned around and said, sorry, I couldn't stay longer, and got in the cab and off he went.
• [00:22:37] AMY CANTU: You wanted to set up the new space so that people could not stay there?
• [00:22:42] LINDA SIGLIN: No. Some still stayed. We had an extra room in the house [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:22:47] AMY CANTU: You like that?
• [00:22:48] LINDA SIGLIN: Like Arlo and people like that and rambling Jack. He always wanted to stay. I said the only thing you can't do, Jack, is use the phone because Jack had a real history of calling and being on the phone for hours and just [OVERLAPPING] oh, yeah, you got that right. You just got stuck with big bills. I think actually, he went on the Rolling Thunder review and all of the money he made went to pay his phone bills from his per diems and stuff.
• [00:23:24] AMY CANTU: That's hilarious.
• [00:23:25] LINDA SIGLIN: But he always called collect from our phone, so it was fine.
• [00:23:32] ANDREW MACLAREN: Was this standard within the folk scene at the time that when performers were coming to a town, a place to stay would be provided for them or was there something special about the Ark?
• [00:23:42] DAVE SIGLIN: For our performers, I would say yes. If you were a famous singer like Tom Rush, probably not. I don't think Joni Mitchell stayed in people's houses, but it was pretty common around the country for, if you ran a small club and say Michael Cooney was coming, you would make sure he had somewhere to stay and they usually would stay with the family. Well, because the Ark was a big house, they just stayed with us and people would stay for a week, two weeks, three or four days or whatever.
• [00:24:17] LINDA SIGLIN: I was very lucky. I got to cook and do all the laundry. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:24:22] DAVE SIGLIN: They did their own laundry.
• [00:24:25] LINDA SIGLIN: But the bedding and stuff.
• [00:24:27] AMY CANTU: But the conversations you had?
• [00:24:28] LINDA SIGLIN: Oh, yeah. The music was great.
• [00:24:31] DAVE SIGLIN: We had a lot of fun. It was very nice. But for me, it was very intimidating because I was a musician and I was hiring these musicians who were, I remember one time Allie Baines, an incredible fiddler, said, hey, get out your fiddle, let's jump, because I played fiddle and I said, that's okay, I'll listen, you guys jam. I basically stopped playing music for a long time because it was totally intimidating. I didn't play in public, I played alone.
• [00:25:09] AMY CANTU: Alone, wow.
• [00:25:10] DAVE SIGLIN: Like most of us.
• [00:25:13] LINDA SIGLIN: But people like Dave Van Ronk, and knowing them and hearing some of the stories that they'd tell about the village, all of those things were very fascinating and I didn't know anything about anybody. So I was not impressed so to speak, but it was very eye opening.
• [00:25:36] ANDREW MACLAREN: Did you two have a chance to travel around anywhere and go to other clubs and see how they were doing it in other cities?
• [00:25:41] LINDA SIGLIN: No. We mostly just went to festivals like Mariposa Folk Festival, Philadelphia Folk Festival, and Newport Festivals.
• [00:25:53] DAVE SIGLIN: We went to a couple of places. On our way down to Florida, we stopped off in Chapel Hill and saw Cat's Cradle. I am so glad I married you. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:26:12] LINDA SIGLIN: Yeah, me too. [LAUGHTER] It's been a ride.
• [00:26:17] DAVE SIGLIN: The Cat's Cradle, and I thought that I had invented that window to look through the window to see the show and I thought, what a genius I am. This is at Ark 2, and I remember Josh White came and he's performing at the Ark. He says, the window is great. The Cat's Cradle was so good to do that and I went, Cat's Cradle. Oh my God. I stole the idea completely. What an idiot. We went to San Diego, and we went to the Heritage.
• [00:26:45] LINDA SIGLIN: Oh. Tom Waits was the doorman there.
• [00:26:48] AMY CANTU: Oh, my gosh.
• [00:26:49] LINDA SIGLIN: It was so funny and he let everybody in.
• [00:26:52] DAVE SIGLIN: Free.
• [00:26:53] LINDA SIGLIN: Free.
• [00:26:53] DAVE SIGLIN: Because he was reading comics.
• [00:26:55] LINDA SIGLIN: They were having a fundraiser and I thought, my God, no wonder they don't have any money here. They got an idiot at the door for God's sake. [LAUGHTER] They said it was just Tom. Actually he came back, I think maybe couple of years later and he came to the Ark and we were sitting around in the back room at the Ark 1. One of the women who he had been going with. [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:27:25] DAVE SIGLIN: His high school sweetheart.
• [00:27:26] LINDA SIGLIN: Bobby Thomas was there and she says, you really ought to hear this guy sing, Linda. He's really good, and I said, God, Bonnie, do I look like I was like playing cards or something? I'm like, I'm not going to go out and listen to this guy sing. He was out there playing the piano in the other room. But then we never hired him. [LAUGHTER] Because he got instantly famous, he was one of those guys that he's nobody and then he's playing Power Center, or he's playing big shows.
• [00:28:03] DAVE SIGLIN: But we became friends. He always stopped over to the Ark whenever he was in town and we'd talk. When he was in Dracula, the movie that he was in, he played Renfield and he asked us to send him a copy of John Roberts and Tony Barrand singing Bedlam, because he wanted to use that for his inspiration for the character. He's a really nice guy.
• [00:28:30] AMY CANTU: Yeah, what a great story.
• [00:28:31] DAVE SIGLIN: He stayed at Barry O'neill's apartment for a long time because Barry O'neill is a singer Canadian and he was in graduate school at U of M and he came over to the Ark all the time and he sings this really obscure folk songs. He just goes and he finds he has a photographic memory. He knows probably 1,000 songs and he got a MacArthur Grant and he teaches mathematical psychology and game theory at University of Southern California. Nations use his writings when they're negotiating peace treaties and he was just this guy. He was a very sloppy apartment and Waits loved it because it was so sloppy. [LAUGHTER] Barry was actually so sloppy that the first year were there that summer, he asked if he could borrow some money because he wanted to get home to Toronto. I lent him $100 which was like one fourth of my salary for the month. Then he had lost his wallet. That's what it was. A year later, he was performing at the Ark and Roger Renick was singing with him and Roger came to us and said, can I stay here, because he had been staying with Barry. He said, Barry's bed is really lumpy and he said, can we go over and get my stuff? So we went over and there was Barry's bed and the mattress was like there was this little hill in the middle of the mattress and I lifted up the mattress and there was Barry's wallet and his typewriter.
• [00:30:14] AMY CANTU: [LAUGHTER] Under there?
• [00:30:17] DAVE SIGLIN: Yeah. So Barry had been sleeping on his typewriter for a year and didn't notice.
• [00:30:26] AMY CANTU: Oh my God.
• [00:30:27] DAVE SIGLIN: Anyway.
• [00:30:29] AMY CANTU: These are great stories.
• [00:30:30] DAVE SIGLIN: Barry's an incredible guy. He is amazing. If you can look him up, he's got a website and everything, and he'll take his classes to Europe and sometimes he'll teach or just bring in a ukulele and sing songs to us. This is a doctoral class, and they rate their teachers, and 90% of the kids who rate him say this is the most fantastic teacher I've ever had. You never know what he's going to teach and blah, blah, blah, blah and 10% say this is a horrible class.
• [00:31:00] ANDREW MACLAREN: So is this stuff meeting the people listening to the music, is this what kept you there and turned to this thing that you were going to do temporarily because you had no prospects into something that you stuck with and stuck with and actually [OVERLAPPING] ?
• [00:31:13] DAVE SIGLIN: Well, we first decided we weren't going to leave until we had gotten the Ark financially solid, which never happened. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:31:21] LINDA SIGLIN: No, now it is. [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:31:27] DAVE SIGLIN: Now it is. After I retired we became financially solid.
• [00:31:28] LINDA SIGLIN: Took over the finances [LAUGHTER] Never David, strong point [LAUGHTER]
• [00:31:33] DAVE SIGLIN: I always thought breaking even at the end of the year was the goal of a nonprofit. If you have zero profit and zero loss, you've done an amazing job. That wasn't exactly how the board felt.
• [00:31:45] LINDA SIGLIN: That's not right [LAUGHTER].
• [00:31:48] ANDREW MACLAREN: What advantages did Ark 2 offer over Ark 1?
• [00:31:52] DAVE SIGLIN: A real stage, it could seat more people, you could hire more bands, but they would have to be acoustic.
• [00:32:01] LINDA SIGLIN: You could get refreshments there. At the Ark 1, everything was free, once you paid your admission, we would give away doughnuts and I would make popcorn.
• [00:32:14] DAVE SIGLIN: You could buy pop at Ark 1. We had a pop machine. Us and the Michigan daily were still, towards the end, were the only places you could get a Coke for $0.10. We were very proud of that. It cost us about $0.13 to buy the coke. It was like a loss.
• [00:32:30] LINDA SIGLIN: See what I said about his financial [LAUGHTER] Well, raised the price, Dave?
• [00:32:38] DAVE SIGLIN: Ark 2, we had a counter and you could buy coffee and buy pop. We tried to sell food and have a restaurant kind of set up, and opening night we had Cheetos and some crunchy stuff and Jim Ringer and Mary Casan performing. That was that first weekend in Jim and Mary said it was driving me nuts, this guy in the front row was chewing on something that was crunching. Jim said, I didn't even notice it, and so we cut all that out and figured out what kind of food you could actually sell, that wouldn't.
• [00:33:20] LINDA SIGLIN: It didn't work out though. You couldn't have waitresses. It would have worked for a different place. But having come from Ark 1 to Ark 2 people didn't like the waitresses wandering around, and ordering food and stuff like that. The only person who really made a lot of money was Anya, our daughter who made the most tips of anybody. I thought that was interesting.
• [00:33:45] AMY CANTU: What was her secret?
• [00:33:46] LINDA SIGLIN: She's very pretty girl [LAUGHTER]
• [00:33:51] DAVE SIGLIN: She was also good.
• [00:33:52] LINDA SIGLIN: She was a very attractive [LAUGHTER]
• [00:33:53] DAVE SIGLIN: She had worked at Casey's and worked at 328 South Main was a very classy restaurant that went under.
• [00:34:06] LINDA SIGLIN: She was used to hustling.
• [00:34:08] DAVE SIGLIN: She knew how to work for tips.
• [00:34:11] AMY CANTU: Wow.
• [00:34:11] AMY CANTU: Did the clientele all follow you to Main Street or did you lose some people when you moved away from campus?
• [00:34:17] DAVE SIGLIN: I guess you don't miss what you don't see, but I don't think we lost anybody.
• [00:34:23] LINDA SIGLIN: I think we got more of a audience that was older, I think because they wanted a place to go, and they were sitting at a table in chairs rather than on the floor, so I think it bumped up the audience a bit. The age of the audience.
• [00:34:44] DAVE SIGLIN: We could expand our music because at Ark 1 you really couldn't do bands. We did some bands, Brombergs Band and the Green Grass Cloggers, we had them put duct tape on their cleats because we had oak floors.
• [00:34:59] AMY CANTU: No [LAUGHTER]
• [00:35:00] DAVE SIGLIN: The first night they were there they're dancing away and these oak chips are just flying at the audience.
• [00:35:05] AMY CANTU: Oh, no.
• [00:35:07] DAVE SIGLIN: But at Ark 2, we had bluegrass. We couldn't do much bluegrass at Ark 1 because they were bands, and I remember the RFD Boys had been playing the Pretzel Bell and the Pretzel Bell went under in 1984, and I remember Charlie Ray came to me and they had started out at the Ark. The Harmony Grits was their original name. In 1969 in September, they played The Ark. I asked about playing The Ark, and so I booked them for every Friday night and I thought fantastic, now I don't have to book Friday nights. They played once a week for years on Friday nights. Now they play I guess once a month because they're older. It was very hard to get a real Bluegrass audience. It's hard to get certain groups of people there. I'm so bad with names, I've forgotten her name, but she was an Eastern European singer. She did the vocals for the movie.
• [00:36:25] LINDA SIGLIN: You've lost your mind.
• [00:36:26] DAVE SIGLIN: I have[LAUGHTER] Anyway, she did the vocals for it. This audience came and I would say a lot of them first generation Americans. They were very suspicious of the place, but now they wanted to see her. They were looking around like, waiting to be robbed.
• [00:36:51] AMY CANTU: Wow.
• [00:36:51] DAVE SIGLIN: But they came to see her and it was a phenomenal show, and once they enjoyed that, they would come back to see other people in that genre of music. The same with Bluegrass, it was very hard getting a Bluegrass audience there.
• [00:37:07] LINDA SIGLIN: Well, the performers are also very insular. Like Norman Blake and Nancy Blake, they don't like to talk to a lot of Northerners. It's an interesting thing until they get to know you and trust you and then they will tell you about other people who would like to play up north, there was still a big north, south divide. In their minds, it was curious.
• [00:37:33] AMY CANTU: Did the RFD boys have an audience that would then come to the others?
• [00:37:37] LINDA SIGLIN: Yeah.
• [00:37:37] DAVE SIGLIN: They had an audience, yes. But it didn't carry over to an unknown Bluegrass Band or a traditional Bluegrass Band from somewhere else. I remember being in school kids records and I saw Bill Monroe record and I thought, Bill Monroe, wow. I hired Bill Monroe and we thought, well, this is going to get everybody. He wasn't selling.
• [00:38:04] AMY CANTU: Oh my God.
• [00:38:05] DAVE SIGLIN: He just wasn't selling any tickets. But he had an incident in his private life that became very unprivate. We had a friend who was writing for The Detroit News and he called me up and he said, how is Bill selling? I said, oh, he's not selling well at all, it's really bad. He says, don't worry about it, he'll sell. He had this column in the back page of The Detroit News names and faces, and it seems that Bill had been cheating on his wife or girlfriend, I don't know if they were married. They were in his bus and she said, "Don't lie to me" and she held a Bible up to him and she said, "Swear on this Bible that you haven't been cheating on me". He took the Bible and he threw it out the window and said, "I'll swear on that Bible" [LAUGHTER] She grabbed his mandolin and said, oh yeah, and threw his mandolin out the window, which was probably worth $600,000, and he hit her, and she pressed charges, and so he had to go to court, and the judge was a Bill Monroe fan, and he'd say, Mr. Monroe, can I have your autograph blah. Every day there was another little blurb about Bill in the names and faces. Bill appeared at the court, and the second day of the trial, and the third day of the trial, and the show just sold out. It was just unbelievable. It sold out because the audience supported Bill. He brought this woman with him to the show to open for him. Well, she didn't open, he was doing the show and the audience was eh, eh, eh, and he said, now I'm going to bring a guest on and I forget what her first name was, and I don't think her last name really was, but it was somebody like Debbie Christian or somebody like that. The last name was Christian. Everyone was like, wonderful. She walked up and they took one look at her and they went. It was like, oh, this was the harlot that he had been with when he cheated on his wife. They just closed down right there. The rest of the show was a little tense, but he sold out, and they came back to see Jim and Jesse and all different really great Bluegrass acts, and that's how Bluegrass [OVERLAPPING] Well, they also had a young audience.
• [00:40:47] AMY CANTU: You're watching the grassroots, the folk. Talk a little bit about how the music was changing, and not just because of the venue, but just in the folk tradition and the grassroots that you had dedicated yourself.
• [00:41:04] LINDA SIGLIN: Well, Canterbury House of course went out of business, so at that point the Ark started hiring singer-songwriters, so Steve Goodman, John Prime, Tom Paxton and all those people then were available to play at the Ark. So that helped the Ark evolve right there because it was a breaking of the traditional music, only to other forms of music like Irish fiddle music, Scottish music, we see songs, shanties, so there were all kinds of evolutions of the music, earlier on and so it just continued that way. People would come to us with ideas and names of people they'd heard, younger people or older people. We had a lot of grants to do, Michigan musicians and things like that.
• [00:42:05] DAVE SIGLIN: Our goal was to fill a niche, to fill a void.
• [00:42:12] DAVE SIGLIN: If we had started hiring pop folk musicians to compete with Canterbury House we'd both go out of business and it wouldn't help the town at all. Ann Arbor wouldn't be better for it. One thing that Cooney suggested to us was it wasn't who could play the ark, it's who should play the ark. We would have performers recommend performers that they liked and so it was like way over my head. I hadn't heard of half of these people but I'd bring them in and they were really good.
• [00:42:49] ANDREW MACLAREN: So you would bring in people that you hadn't heard at all?
• [00:42:52] DAVE SIGLIN: I would hear them. I'd go out of my way to hear a record or a tape or something of them but like Michael Cooney said you need to hire Billy Vanderveer. Well I'd never even heard of Billy Vanderveer. So Billy came and he played to like 30 people because nobody had ever heard of him. But our goal was that if we just kept doing really good music the audience would come. It's one of those if you build it, they will come and we wouldn't ask the Michigan Daily to do a preview we'd asked them to review the show. If we kept getting good reviews then people would go, hey, that music must be okay.
• [00:43:31] AMY CANTU: You were counting on people to take a chance.
• [00:43:33] LINDA SIGLIN: Yeah, and I think a lot of our hardships with having to raise funds and other musicians coming forward and doing large benefits like Pete Seeger did a benefit for us at the Michigan Theater and gave us 100% of everything including his travel. That was because Hedy West who played the Ark and loved it talked to Pete and said, would you do this for these people? Because they're running a club and they're doing a lot for their community. Because Pete was interested in not just forwarding the music but he wanted to know about the club and what was going on there.
• [00:44:17] DAVE SIGLIN: I drove him from the airport to the Michigan Theater and he said how long does it take to get to the theater and I said about 25 minutes. He said tell me everything you can about the Ark in 25 minutes. So I just started talking about the ark and we got there he said I'm ready. Then he went on stage did his sound check and said now I have to take a nap and so wake me about a half hour before the show.
• [00:44:46] AMY CANTU: Would he then talk about what you had said on stage then?
• [00:44:50] DAVE SIGLIN: Well he incorporated into his show. People when you hear a performer do that and they're really good at it you're thinking, well God how many times was he there.
• [00:45:01] LINDA SIGLIN: [LAUGHTER]
• [00:45:03] AMY CANTU: Can you talk a little bit more about the evolution of the folk festival itself? I think we did start in 1978, that's what I read. Does that sound not right?
• [00:45:14] DAVE SIGLIN: The summer of around 78.
• [00:45:18] LINDA SIGLIN: That was presented to us by one of the people at the university in major events and asked us to start a summer festival and that's why the first one was in the summer. She wanted us to start a traditional summer festival because there was no music in summer.
• [00:45:36] DAVE SIGLIN: Sue Young, she was head of the office of major events at that time.
• [00:45:43] AMY CANTU: So how was the first festival -- can you talk a little...
• [00:45:47] LINDA SIGLIN: They did that 100% of free event. In other words we got all the money, the Ark and we begged for it.
• [00:45:54] DAVE SIGLIN: Except for their expenses.
• [00:45:55] LINDA SIGLIN: But still we didn't pay anybody.
• [00:45:58] AMY CANTU: It got bigger and bigger didn't it?
• [00:46:03] DAVE SIGLIN: It was just a one off. It's just going to be I think it was called a festival of music or something like that and I remember we made $8,000 and that was a lot of money then and that was it. Then a year and a half later they asked us to do another one or we asked them, we figured out this is the best way to raise money. I don't remember how the second one started but that was in January and I kept going from there and it was in the Power Center for four years.
• [00:46:45] LINDA SIGLIN: It's a terrible time to have a festival in the middle of January. [LAUGHTER] I know there was nothing else going on but I remember sitting at the campus inn with Bromberg and looking out and it's just like nobody's going to come out in this weather David. It's just awful out there, winds whipping by, the ice storms and everything and people showed up and still came to the festival. It was a brilliant idea that Sue had and passed on and we kept going and as more people wanted to come to it we went to different venues.
• [00:47:25] DAVE SIGLIN: There were two shows one in the afternoon, one in the evening and you could buy a ticket for one, the other or both and it was the same headliner for both. But the other performers were different in the afternoon and the evening and then I went to the Michigan Theater for two years which was a larger venue and the fourth annual folk festival. Karen Young was head of the Office of Major Events and they told us Bromberg couldn't headline it because he headlined the first three. We found a different headliner and it didn't draw as well and they said it didn't draw very well so that will be the end of it, we won't do anymore. So we moved to the Michigan Theater for three years and it did great and then Linda was working at the Office of Major Events which actually it wasn't good. It wasn't bad but it wasn't good it didn't help us because it was a conflict of interest for her.
• [00:48:36] LINDA SIGLIN: You said that it didn't help you. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:48:41] DAVE SIGLIN: I mean her boss wanted to make sure that she was not involved in that. He didn't make decisions good for us because she worked for him.
• [00:48:49] LINDA SIGLIN: No actually they took more from the ark than anyone else which I always thought was terrible but that's often the way it is when you go to make sure you're not helping somebody. You overburden them with more costs than you would another, say student organization. That was interesting.
• [00:49:12] DAVE SIGLIN: Well then we went back to Hill Auditorium.
• [00:49:20] DAVE SIGLIN: It did fine and I remember it was the eighth. The eighth was Bromberg was headlining it and he brought a friend of his there and it was Arlo Guthrie. Everybody freaked out because Arlo Guthrie was there. Then Arlo headlined the ninth and it oversold. They had 200 standing room seats at hill, so it drew 4,300 people, something like that. It was like, wow. It just kept going, and eventually they were restoring hill so we had to move, and we moved back to the Michigan Theater and did two nights at the Michigan Theater instead of one, and then we went back to Hill Auditorium two years later and kept the two nights, so that's was [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:50:09] LINDA SIGLIN: Friday night was supposed to be more for the students, in other words, a real young act, like a Billy Strings or somebody like that then that's just the way it evolved. Then it went back during the pandemic to one, and now I think it's going back to two again.
• [00:50:28] AMY CANTU: Did it get so popular? Did it get to the point where you had to turn [OVERLAPPING] .
• [00:50:31] LINDA SIGLIN: Both nights were selling out, so yeah, it was very popular. The Friday night was definitely student-oriented and then Saturday night was more for the older crowd.
• [00:50:45] AMY CANTU: But in terms of scheduling the line-up, did you have to turn people away? How did you do that?
• [00:50:52] DAVE SIGLIN: Friday night didn't sell as well as Saturday night in the beginning and Saturday, sometimes it would sell out and you'd have to turn people away. Then both started filling up, and it really, it's the major fundraiser for The Ark. It actually saved The Ark. After I left, they got a professional fundraiser, and now The Ark has expanded in a lot of directions. When they couldn't do the Folk Festival, that's like $100,000 loss right there and so they had to make up for that and they're going pretty well.
• [00:51:42] LINDA SIGLIN: But people don't realize how much those things really cost to do because, you know, everybody know their headliners getting over $100,000, a lot of them. People don't come anymore for free, so it's a big investment to do.
• [00:52:01] DAVE SIGLIN: Originally, it was a benefit. To me a benefit is when the performer takes no money. Now it's a fund raiser, everybody's paid and the profit is the fundraiser.
• [00:52:16] AMY CANTU: Very different thing.
• [00:52:18] ANDREW MACLAREN: When did that switch happen and why did it happen?
• [00:52:23] DAVE SIGLIN: You can't keep asking people to do something for nothing. [LAUGHTER] Eventually, they started off doing it for nothing because they loved what we were doing and we had helped them when they were nobodies and eventually you got to pay it forward. Emmylou Harris had no real connection to The Ark, except a lot of her friends had played The Ark and had played in concerts. You pay Emmylou Harris and that's great. She knows about The Ark now, but you can't expect her to do it for nothing. Why? Joan Baez was headlining one year and her sister Mimi Farina was dying of cancer and Joan had to cancel. I called Mark Moss at sing out and he called Pete Seeger, so Pete would call me back. I had to call him a specific time, and he had already done a benefit for The Ark years before. He was a very interesting person. I said, Pete, this is Dave Siglin, he knew who I was and he said, When are you going to retire? [LAUGHTER] I was asking him to take Joan's place and he didn't, but Peter Yarrow did, but he was doing a benefit in Chicago the day before and I thought, well, he could then just come to Ann Arbor, but he was getting up there in years and he just wanted to get home. I thought that was pretty funny. He had a great way of just turning it right back on you. When are you going to retire? I'm not ready to retire yet. You should think about it and blow off. [LAUGHTER] The whole conversation was why I'm I still working?
• [00:54:31] AMY CANTU: The Ark three. Can you talk a little bit about the second main street?
• [00:54:38] LINDA SIGLIN: It's a great place. It's really beautiful. It's the culmination of the other two. I think one of the things that the third one doesn't have as much as the first one and you can't ever do that again because, the people running it were young and, everything was new, so it just evolved into, two more of an organized place now.
• [00:55:05] DAVE SIGLIN: The first one, also related to the audience as individual people. You got to know the people in your audience and you got to become friends with a lot of them. We used to have community dinners at Ark 1 every so often, maybe like every other week or whatever, and people would just bring their favorite food. We said don't bring something you think everybody will like. Bring your favorite food because if you bring something everybody will like, it's all this bland stuff that's not going to offend anyone. I remember this one guy used to bring ice cream and he would make milkshakes, that's what he loved. People brought incredible food, they all got to know each other. We had a thanksgiving one time where it was like 30 kids who weren't going home for thanksgiving. It's a bunch of turkeys and they had a great time but you can't do that at Ark 3 and you really couldn't do it at Ark 2.
• [00:56:00] LINDA SIGLIN: Ark 1 was very special for a lot of the people. We just had not young anymore but one of the kids that I took into the house and him and his dog and his mother had, it was just a horrific story. Anyway, we moved him in with us for a while because he wasn't getting along with his mother and there was too much tension there. There was a large dog involved in [LAUGHTER] the whole story.
• [00:56:27] DAVE SIGLIN: The dog and that in the postman.
• [00:56:28] LINDA SIGLIN: She had taken the kid's dog and to the humane society and we went back and got his bloody dog for [LAUGHTER] him. Anyway, he just came to visit us this last weekend. He's married, he became a [OVERLAPPING]
• [00:56:47] DAVE SIGLIN: Forest ranger.
• [00:56:48] LINDA SIGLIN: Forest ranger and he was married three children, and they all were fabulous. It was just really gratifying. And he wanted to come back to Ann Arbor to show his family where he'd been and introduce us to them.
• [00:57:07] DAVE SIGLIN: You can't do that now. The Ark is a completely different place. The Ark presents concerts now. Before the musicians stayed in town for a week, and they would go to Mark's coffee house or wherever, or the Brown Jug or wherever to eat and they would meet people. "I saw you in the show." They'd sit down and talk to people, and the town would get to know them. That's not true anymore it's just different. It's not better or worse, it's just different.
• [00:57:39] AMY CANTU: Do you think it's just the venue or do you think it's also just the changing times?
• [00:57:43] LINDA SIGLIN: I think it's the changing times. I don't think people want to know each other anymore. [LAUGHTER] Really. The pandemic really helped solidify that for a lot of people, they found out that they could live alone and it was fine. [LAUGHTER] There was no need to even go out. In other words, to get people to come back even to see shows is a challenge after that, I think so.
• [00:58:13] ANDREW MACLAREN: Have you seen the sense of community around The Ark change over the years or do you still have people who they're steadfast and they keep coming back again and again, again has always been a feature of The Ark?
• [00:58:24] LINDA SIGLIN: Yes, it's true because they have over 300 volunteers. It's still a volunteer organization where the people that serve you your food and that kind of thing, when you come in or take your money, they're not all working as employees. A lot of those people are volunteers and when they do the folk festival, it's always done by all of the volunteers, so it's got a big base still in the community. I think it's vital.
• [00:58:59] AMY CANTU: This might sound like a strange question, but just in terms of a couple of questions about The Arks. Is there anybody who got away that you couldn't get? Or is there any?
• [00:59:11] DAVE SIGLIN: Sure.
• [00:59:12] AMY CANTU: Like who?
• [00:59:13] DAVE SIGLIN: Years ago. When I was still there, which was years ago, I retired in 2008. Norah Jones was opening for Taj Mahal, and she was really good, and after she performed, she came up into the bar area and I said, Norah, you were really good, and anytime you want to come back, I will hire you. She smiled and said, thank you, and was very nice, and never saw her again.
• [00:59:45] AMY CANTU: She got big right away.
• [00:59:46] DAVE SIGLIN: Yes.
• [00:59:47] AMY CANTU: That was a huge, and 1,000 Grammys.
• [00:59:48] LINDA SIGLIN: Isn't that amazing how people go like that? I always thought that was interesting.
• [00:59:54] DAVE SIGLIN: Well, here's one. Jimmy Dale Gilmore was performing at The Ark. Now Jimmy Dale is a diamond. He's from Austin and I think of him like Dick Siegel is like that in Ann Arbor. They never left their town, Dick should have been performing nationally. Jimmy Dale went on a national tour and oh my God, I'm forgetting who it was.
• [01:00:21] DAVE SIGLIN: He had an opening act. I got the writer for the opening act and it was like I had to rent drums, this that, it was going to cost like $500 for the opening act and I called the agent and I said, I can't possibly do this. He said, oh, don't worry about it, you'll just use Jimmy's stuff. That saved me $500 right there. Then they came and she is so famous.
• [01:00:49] LINDA SIGLIN: I don't even know who you're talking about.
• [01:00:51] DAVE SIGLIN: She couldn't come because she was going to be on the Johnny Carson Show that night.
• [01:00:55] LINDA SIGLIN: Oh my gosh.
• [01:00:57] DAVE SIGLIN: I'm just blanking on her name and she is like, wham way up there. I'll remember, I'll just blur her name out somewhere.
• [01:01:09] LINDA SIGLIN: In your sleep. [LAUGHTER].
• [01:01:11] DAVE SIGLIN: In about five minutes.
• [01:01:14] AMY CANTU: Some of the local acts, the local players you just mentioned, Dick Siegel, anyone else?
• [01:01:21] LINDA SIGLIN: The Chenilles, they were the favorites of Ann Arbor.
• [01:01:24] DAVE SIGLIN: Yeah, I heard them singing on a street corner and I went, you guys are really good. You should open for persuasions who were playing the Ark. They did and the people loved them. We put them in the folks festival as an opening act for the festival and the next time they played, they did the Power Center. It just went.
• [01:01:44] AMY CANTU: They blew up pretty quick. Yeah.
• [01:01:45] DAVE SIGLIN: Yes they did.
• [01:01:48] ANDREW MACLAREN: Did anyone ever question your decisions? It sounds like you just booked whoever you wanted to book and went with your feelings on things. Was there ever anyone on the board who was like, uh, that's not how we want to approach this anymore. We want to be more professional or something.
• [01:02:04] LINDA SIGLIN: No, they didn't dare. [LAUGHTER] It's hard to get to get by. It's a wall, you put up. But we've always had autonomy for who played them and nobody ever said, the guy's not going to talk. He's not going to perform because of the songs he does or the way he looks or who he is. That was never ever brought to us. We wouldn't have listened to them anyway had they brought it there. We would have left.
• [01:02:42] DAVE SIGLIN: I just have the feeling that when I retired, the board went, oh, thank God. [LAUGHTER].
• [01:02:49] LINDA SIGLIN: Yeah. But there's still a Siglin there and she's really good.
• [01:02:56] DAVE SIGLIN: She's much better than I was.
• [01:02:57] LINDA SIGLIN: Yeah. We just need one of her kids to take over now. She's getting along in the deeds as well.
• [01:03:04] DAVE SIGLIN: No, sorry. She's in her 50s.
• [01:03:06] LINDA SIGLIN: She's old.
• [01:03:07] AMY CANTU: How would you describe the changes since then? Since you retired?
• [01:03:11] DAVE SIGLIN: Since I left?
• [01:03:11] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
• [01:03:12] DAVE SIGLIN: Well, I haven't been there a lot. I go to shows.
• [01:03:15] AMY CANTU: You see what they were doing though.
• [01:03:17] DAVE SIGLIN: Well, I remember when JBL contacted me about Beth Nielsen Chapman was playing the Ark and she was very famous in Japan and a bunch of the heads from Japan were coming over to the area and they wanted to treat them to see Beth Nielsen Chapman. This was Beth's first time at the Ark and they said what equipment do you have. I told them and they went oh. They gave us some monitors to set on the stage so the big wigs from Japan would see JBL on the monitors. They were at the show and I remember this one Japanese fellow went over and he looked at the soundboard and stuff and said oh, such and such. I forget what it was. Good, and they donated all our sound equipment to us.
• [01:04:24] LINDA SIGLIN: Yeah, they've been very lucky. The Ford listening room, the Fords have donated quite a lot to the Ark 3.
• [01:04:33] DAVE SIGLIN: They have been huge physical improvements. The lighting is phenomenal. The stage lighting.
• [01:04:39] LINDA SIGLIN: We had little coffee cans. We first started for our coffee can lighting.
• [01:04:47] DAVE SIGLIN: You had said there were other clubs in Ann Arbor at the time. When we first started, there was a club in Alice Lloyd Hall and they called it Alice's restaurant. Jerry and Israel ran it and Reverend Gary Davis came and stayed at the Ark. He was too famous, we thought to perform at the Ark. We put him in Alice's restaurant, which could hold 300 people and he performed there. Then he stayed with us for several other weeks. but Jerry Anne came and volunteered at the Ark and then she had her father who was an electrician come and he put our lights in at Ark 1, all of them. Coffee cans with anybody, he hard wired it in. That was the same at Ark 2. We did the same lights but now it's unbelievable what they've got there. They can change.
• [01:05:47] LINDA SIGLIN: They can do a lot more, they can do second cities and they just did J Steels play and stuff. It's more functional for those kinds of presentations.
• [01:05:59] DAVE SIGLIN: It can do everything. Well, I remember the Saw doctors were playing there and they blew out one of the speakers. They just went [NOISE] and they were blazing away so we had to replace that but one of the cones in the speakers. But other than that, I don't think there's anything they can't handle. What they can't handle is an audience that wants to just stand. The stage now is about three feet off the floor but that isn't high enough if people in the front are standing.
• [01:06:38] ANDREW MACLAREN: Has that ever been a problem?
• [01:06:40] DAVE SIGLIN: Yeah.
• [01:06:42] LINDA SIGLIN: Some people won't play your venue if you have any seats at all and that they want standing audience.
• [01:06:48] AMY CANTU: Oh, really?
• [01:06:49] LINDA SIGLIN: Yeah.
• [01:06:49] DAVE SIGLIN: That happens a lot at the Majestic in Detroit. The audience stands up.
• [01:06:54] LINDA SIGLIN: Yeah.
• [01:06:55] DAVE SIGLIN: A listening room. There is a listening room.
• [01:07:02] LINDA SIGLIN: Yeah.
• [01:07:03] DAVE SIGLIN: As long as it remembers that it'll be on the right track.
• [01:07:12] ANDREW MACLAREN: You must have seen a lot of people come through before they either made it big or didn't make it big. Are there people who you knew when they were nothing and you were like, no, they're going to make it or people who did make it big and you're like, boy when I met them they didn't seem I didn't think they were good [LAUGHTER].
• [01:07:32] LINDA SIGLIN: The first time I heard Rufus Wainwright with Kate, his mother we were sitting at Winnipeg. He and his sister were singing on stage and I thought, God, what is Kate? What are you? It doesn't sound right to me and then all of a sudden Rufus was way up here and I'm like whoa, and I totally didn't hear it but yeah, anyway, I listened again and Rufus is really very good. But the first time I heard him I was not enamored with him.
• [01:08:10] DAVE SIGLIN: The Dixie Chicks, when they started out, they were like a tribute to old western movies band and they were very good. But then when Natalie Maines joined them, they were opening for Guy Clark, I think it was at the Ark. I heard them, I went, whoa, they're going all the way and they did.
• [01:08:35] LINDA SIGLIN: Then they got very snobby. Lots of people when they get very big, they'd still say hi, how you doing. Other people, Bonnie Raitt is always either, hi Linda, are you still with Dave? That was always her second question because she had a lot of different husbands or partners so it always stuck on her head. That and Anya, one time when we went to see Bonnie and say hello at the power center, Anya had dyed her hair red and Bonnie thought that was great. She thought, oh, look at you. You look great.
• [01:09:15] DAVE SIGLIN: I think that's true.
• [01:09:16] LINDA SIGLIN: Yeah. But she's hot and cold.
• [01:09:21] DAVE SIGLIN: I think that's true with a lot of artists on your way up.
• [01:09:25] LINDA SIGLIN: But she always wanted to be super famous.
• [01:09:27] DAVE SIGLIN: If you want to become a star, you're going to have to step on people to do it. Or you have to have an agent who steps on them for you and then you can be a nice person. But then when you make it, then you lighten up again and you're a nice person again. Bonnie got on her way up, and now she's just super nice again.
• [01:09:49] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
• [01:09:50] DAVE SIGLIN: Because she doesn't have anything to fear. She knows she's still going to have money next year. She's not going to be broke.
• [01:09:56] ANDREW MACLAREN: Did the business part of this change over time, like originally you were calling artists directly on the phone and then eventually it got to a point where you were only dealing with agents?
• [01:10:07] DAVE SIGLIN: Originally we were talking to artists. Then one time I think the third time he was at the Ark or the second time Billy Banner said, we have to talk to my agent and it was Debbie Pheasant and so I talked to his agent and I'm thinking, wow, that is a high powered agent. Blah, blah, blah. Then he came and his girlfriend was Debbie Pheasant. [LAUGHTER] Wait a minute. I've been had but eventually I started talking to agents and I've only dealt with three agents that I didn't get along with. Mostly, there's two ways to go about it and an agent can consider that they're working with the venues or they can take a more of a confrontational kind of thing. That the venue that I need to make as much money as I possibly can for my client and if the venue doesn't give it to me the heck with them. Jim Fleming, Fleming artist works with venues and he'll put an act in relatively cheaply because he knows that act is going to draw well in the future because he trusts his acts and I think that works. But there have been a few agents. There was one that was particularly really obnoxious on the phone and we didn't get along at all, and I won't even mention his name. I ran into him at the Folk Alliance when I was there in Calgary and he was a nice guy and we got along fantastic. I thought, well, good, we're just going to be friends and we're going to get along and we got on the phone the next month to book an act and he was just a prick again. [LAUGHTER]. I was just like, what? I finally told one of his exes.
• [01:12:02] LINDA SIGLIN: Back at work.
• [01:12:03] DAVE SIGLIN: Why don't I play the Ark? I said, you want to play the Ark, you call me directly. I won't deal with your agent.
• [01:12:11] DAVE SIGLIN: Because I don't need it. There's too many people that want to play. I don't need to go through that.
• [01:12:18] ANDREW MACLAREN: Is there something about Ann Arbor as opposed to other communities that you feel like a place like the Ark has been able to work here so successfully for such a long period of time?
• [01:12:31] DAVE SIGLIN: Look at Ann Arbor. It's got everything. It's really phenomenal. It's got the Michigan Theater. It's got UMS. It's got a jazz club, it's got Diana Relie's stuff going on. It's got everything. I remember one time I wanted to do David Amram. You might not know who he is. He's in his '90s now, but he was the first resident composer with a New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein. He had his own jazz band.
• [01:13:02] LINDA SIGLIN: He was in Daisy. [OVERLAPPING]
• [01:13:05] DAVE SIGLIN: Pull My Daisy. He did the music for Pull My Daisy, Jack Kerouac's film. He did the music for the Glass Menagerie. He did the music for the Manchurian candidate, the film. He did the music for a lot of Broadway shows like JB.
• [01:13:19] LINDA SIGLIN: He just had three of his original things performed at Hill Auditorium, like Symphonies.
• [01:13:26] DAVE SIGLIN: He's written Symphonies. He's written jazz. He's written folk.
• [01:13:31] LINDA SIGLIN: He's nutty.
• [01:13:34] DAVE SIGLIN: He's written chamber stuff and I thought we should have a David Amram week in Ann Arbor, have his jazz performed at that time. It was underneath the Ark. I'm blanking on the name.
• [01:13:49] LINDA SIGLIN: By the pound? What are you talking about?
• [01:13:51] DAVE SIGLIN: The jazz club. [OVERLAPPING]
• [01:13:55] LINDA SIGLIN: That place. The Blue something.
• [01:13:56] DAVE SIGLIN: This was like 15, 20 years ago. The jazz club. Firefly?
• [01:14:01] AMY CANTU: No, before that.
• [01:14:02] DAVE SIGLIN: Before firefly?
• [01:14:03] DAVE SIGLIN: It was around the time of the firefly. Anyway, chamber music at Kerry Town Concert House and symphony stuff with UMS and folks stuff at the Ark. We'd all do it. So you could go to one place and the next place, the next place, but it never quite came off. The other thing was everybody was competing with everybody, which I didn't think was necessarily a good thing because we could all compliment. I mean, there's no reason for the Ark to compete with the Blind.
• [01:14:35] LINDA SIGLIN: Dave has not got the killer's instinct. [LAUGHTER]
• [01:14:39] DAVE SIGLIN: There's no reason for the Ark to compete with the Blind Pig. They do different things. They should sit down and say, should this act be at the Blind Pig or the Ark and figure it out for the town. I remember I was doing Billy Bragg. I had booked Billy Bragg and Leberry, he was a friend. Lee and I were talking, he says this is a what's coming up at the Ark. Lee did prison productions and put stuff in the Blind Pig. I said, well, Billy Bragg's coming up. All of a sudden Billy Bragg was playing the Blind Pig. He ripped them out from under me so late in the game that Billy Bragg's T-shirts listed the places he was playing and it said the Ark on the T-shirt. I went, this is going too far. We've got to start getting to know each other and working with each other. I started a softball team which had to be comprised of people in the music business.
• [01:15:38] LINDA SIGLIN: We had Ken Fisher on it.
• [01:15:40] DAVE SIGLIN: Ken Fisher was our clean-up.
• [01:15:42] AMY CANTU: Sounds great.
• [01:15:43] LINDA SIGLIN: It was fun.
• [01:15:46] DAVE SIGLIN: Deb Pollock was on the team. Jim Fleming was on the team. I was on the team, Linwood was on the team. All these different people in the music business. You could be an office manager, didn't make any difference. Some of the people had never played before. We had to teach them how to throw and field and hit and everything. They stayed together, it evolved as they went along for about 10 years and everybody got to know everybody and we all started respecting each other's venues more. I thought that was a good thing.
• [01:16:24] LINDA SIGLIN: You're such a kind man. [LAUGHTER].
• [01:16:27] DAVE SIGLIN: I like softball. [OVERLAPPING] I mean, what are we supposed do? [OVERLAPPING]
• [01:16:36] ANDREW MACLAREN: But it sounds like music in community has been the driving force for both of you for your whole lives and careers. I mean, that's really what you've.
• [01:16:45] LINDA SIGLIN: Not money, that's for sure. We're lucky my parents gave us enough money to buy our house.
• [01:16:55] DAVE SIGLIN: Actually, performers [OVERLAPPING] benefit for us.
• [01:16:57] LINDA SIGLIN: We'd be out on the street, otherwise.
• [01:17:02] AMY CANTU: So what are you most proud of?
• [01:17:05] DAVE SIGLIN: Our daughter and our grandkids. You mean in work?
• [01:17:14] LINDA SIGLIN: It's pretty impressive that the Ark is still here. It was a very big challenge to keep it going.
• [01:17:21] DAVE SIGLIN: When it moved the first time, Bob Gunzl, who was on our board said, things are going to change. I said, well, they have to change. Because it's not sponsored by churches anymore, it's going to be a club. It's going to move, it's going to be more of a club type thing. But when it moved the second time to the third Ark, he said, this is much bigger than the second Ark. I think it costs like $2.5 million. I mean, they raised the money to do that.
• [01:17:52] LINDA SIGLIN: Paid it all back?
• [01:17:56] DAVE SIGLIN: He said it's never going to be the same. You're going to have to understand that it's going to be very different. I said, that's what it has to be. It has to evolve and it can keep going in a place that seats 275 people for a long time, but it'll eventually die. And it has to evolve and so it did, and that seats over 400 people.
• [01:18:30] LINDA SIGLIN: It's a good place to go.
• [01:18:33] DAVE SIGLIN: I can't say it's my Ark. My Ark was Ark 1. I think that was our Ark. Ark 2 was fine, but Ark 1 was incredible. Ark 3 is completely different. I think if you ask somebody who volunteers here now, they would say, this is my place, and that's good.
• [01:18:59] LINDA SIGLIN: People that work are fabulous people. They're good-hearted, kind people. I mean, it's really nice.
• [01:19:10] DAVE SIGLIN: The only rule we had for volunteers, I think at Ark 1, it wasn't like a rule, but we didn't want to have aggressive volunteers.
• [01:19:20] LINDA SIGLIN: No, because I was too aggressive. [LAUGHTER] Nobody more aggressive . [LAUGHTER].
• [01:19:25] DAVE SIGLIN: [LAUGHTER] We have one guy who volunteered, I think one night, and Linda asked him to take some coffee out. They had this big circulator coffee pot. I mean, the show is going out. Just take it out, set it down to come back in. He takes it out and he yells, coming through at the top of his lungs.
• [01:19:45] LINDA SIGLIN: Coffee coming through.
• [01:19:47] DAVE SIGLIN: Just like, no, you don't have the concept. Wait a minute.
• [01:19:51] LINDA SIGLIN: That's great. Good times, we used to do amateur nights too, and now they still do amateur nights or hoot nannies or whatever you want to call them. But when I was running them, I never sent anyone away. I would have anybody who wanted to sing. Would be able to sing that night. They were very long things. Now they only do like 10 or 12 people in a night. Because they're not stupid like I was [LAUGHTER] But those are some of the differences that you'll find that, they have more time limits, and things like that than we had. We had no rules.
• [01:20:39] DAVE SIGLIN: They came from a family that did theater? Her father was a director, and a critic, and a playwright, and had three columns in the Observer papers. One was a travel column, and then a food column, and a theater column, all under different pseudonyms. She knew what sold, and she knew how to do things. I used to run the hoots and we would just draw names from my hat or however they came in. After about five or six years, I couldn't even be at a hoot anymore. It just was driving me crazy because many of them were worse than me. The good ones were somewhat better than me. But I just couldn't listen to amateur music anymore. I said I can't do this anymore, so Linda said, I'll run it. What she did was, she put the beginners or the really bad ones on right in the beginning or right at the end. You could get out, and not have to listen to them, or you could come a little late, and not have to listen to them. But they still would have an audience that they could practice in front of. She would put the best people towards the end of the first set, and starting off the second set, etc. It started drawing an audience. Got a big audience because she knew how to present it. I didn't care about that stuff. That was was like my failing. This kid came into her one day, and I was washing cups, and he said, Linda, I thought I would like to go on maybe start off the second set tonight. She said, well Tom actually I have you, second in the first set. He was awful. I mean, he was just terrible. Terrible. He said, you don't like my music, do you? She said you know what Tom, in every great artist's career, they reach a point where they're just not getting there, they're just not succeeding people. There's somebody in their life who says, no, you have to keep going because you're really, really good, and so you have to keep pushing. It gives them that push, give it one more push and they go right to the top. Or there's somebody in your life that tells them that they're just awful and they should just quit and not foist themselves on people anymore. It makes them so angry, they give it that push and they go right to the top. I'd like to be that person in your career, [LAUGHTER] .
• [01:23:20] LINDA SIGLIN: He never became famous [LAUGHTER]. That was a nice way of putting it. Yes, it was very kind. But get out of here, I mean, really, people do not know how bad or good they are. It is really [FOREIGN].
• [01:23:36] DAVE SIGLIN: He was awful.
• [01:23:37] LINDA SIGLIN: No, I mean awful, I mean so.
• [01:23:42] DAVE SIGLIN: He sang Railroading on the Great Divide is in 34. He sang it in 44. So not only did he sing it terribly, it was 25 percent longer or 33 percent longer.
• [01:23:55] LINDA SIGLIN: I also would walk up on stage if they went too long, and right in the middle of their song, I'd say, that's it, thanks a lot. You're done. I mean, I was my own hook, you know what I mean, it was like no because we had a time limit. Otherwise, I'd have been up all night with people. You know, I didn't mind doing everybody. But anyways.
• [01:24:17] DAVE SIGLIN: She also had a great hearing. We used to do all-nighters on Saturday night. After that first one in May. People loved it. On Saturday night, performers from the Canterbury House and other places, they would all come over to the ark and everybody would sit around, and they'd sing. The only rule that Linda made was because it would go until sunrise, and then everybody would go out for breakfast. They'd be like 53 people.
• [01:24:45] LINDA SIGLIN: No drinking in the house because the [OVERLAPPING].
• [01:24:46] DAVE SIGLIN: 50 people in the audience still, well, there were two rules. No drinking because you couldn't drink at the ark. If there was more than one minute of silence, it was done, it was over. Because people would be falling asleep. There'd be like, you know, nothing for about a minute. That's it. Everybody home. I remember one night it was like 03:00 A.M. or whatever. We decided we're just going to go to bed. They're fine. You know, there's like 20 people sitting in the audience, and about four performers up onstage. That's just fine. We went to bed, and all of a sudden Linda bolts up in bed. We're upstairs. Somebody just opened a beer bottle. [LAUGHTER]. I went, what are you talking about she said somebody just opened a beer bottle. She went downstairs, and Pat Reynolds, she had stuck in beer, and she had popped a bottle. Linda said, that's it, you're all out of here.
• [01:25:49] LINDA SIGLIN: It's amazing though. I still can't sing though [LAUGHTER].
• [01:25:54] AMY CANTU: But you can hear.
• [01:25:55] LINDA SIGLIN: I can hear. Yes, I can hear.
• [01:25:57] AMY CANTU: That's great. Well, thank you so much.
• [01:26:02] DAVE SIGLIN: I'd like to remember the name of that famous singer. I didn't come to you. It has not come to me. I can picture her. She's probably in her '60s now.
• [01:26:13] AMY CANTU: I know and the jazz club is right on the tip of my tongue.
• [01:26:15] LINDA SIGLIN: Oh, yeah. You can remember.
• [01:26:17] AMY CANTU: Ron Brooks
• [01:26:17] DAVE SIGLIN: The Yeah, The Bird of Paradise.
• [01:26:19] AMY CANTU: There we go on .
• [01:26:21] DAVE SIGLIN: Ron Brooks.
• [01:26:22] LINDA SIGLIN: Ron Brooks. You had to get a name. [MUSIC].
• [01:26:34] AMY CANTU: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.