Mike Beck (wrap-up)

By Greg Pool
Host, TreeHouseConcerts.org

Here's a wrap-up of Mike Beck's visit to the Tree House (pictures and after-show interview):

• I first met Mike Beck one Sunday morning outside the KPIG studios, during "Please Stand By." We both started talking and took in a surprise visit from Guy Clark.
  
  
• I met Mike again a few months later at an Arden's Garden show, and he was all excited about getting to see in Bob Dylan in Oakland and going back stage. "What do you say to Bob Dylan?" he asked me. Not a clue!
  
  
• You'll find Mike playing electric guitar around town with his band, The Bohemian Saints.
  
  
• The morning after she attended the concert, KPIG DJ Arden played Mike's "Amanda, Come Home" on her show for the "Sunday Morning Prayer for Peace."
  
  
• Mike's ranch is on the slopes of Mount Toro, in the Santa Lucia Mountains overlooking the Monterey Peninsula to the north. When he mentioned the lights from the antenna site, all I could think was how much snow that elevation gets each winter. That's tough living.
  
  
• Mike grew up just a few streets over from the Tree House. Imagine what it must have been like to grow up on the sleepy, staid Monterey Peninsula and get to attend the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, as he mentioned in the after-show interview.
  
  
• A friend of Mike's asked for an invitation a few days before the show, and it turned out to be a former student of mine a CSU Monterey Bay. Small world!
  
  
• And what can you say about his friend, Ramblin Jack Elliot, coming down from Marin County to hang out with Mike? I'm not sure we'll ever have another Grammy winner in the Tree House, so it was especially neat to see Eric ask Jack to sign his guitar after the show.
  
  
• Ramblin Jack won that Grammy for his 1995 album "South Coast" (Red House Records).
  
  
• When Ramblin Jack played "If I Were A Carpenter," he expertly tuned Mike Beck's Gibson guitar to a double dropped D tuning (DBGDAD) and knocked out a great performance. After his first two songs, I had thought he was tired and not up to it, but he later told me it's because he's used to a PA with a monitor instead of the acousitc setting, and he wasn't hearing himself well enough.
  
  
• Ramblin Jack Elliot's new album on the Anti- label is called "I Stand Alone."
  
  
• Did you like Sonoma's red cowgirl boots? Those came from our friend Gail at Dancing Cat Records, who is a big ol' cowboy fan herself.
  
  
• And Sonoma's shirt had a pair of cowboy boots on them with the caption "These boots are made for crawlin'!"