FolkWax has this part one of an interview with her:
http://www.visnat.com/entertainment/...olkwax_344.cfm -
you have to register I think.
This telephone interview with Karla Bonoff took place on Tuesday October 2, 2007. Bonoff was at home in California and I was in Birmingham, England. Many thanks to Tamara Saviano in Nashville for setting up the interview. Bonoff recently released the twenty-one-song, two-CD recording Karla Bonoff Live. I began the interview by asking how she approached the songwriting process...
Arthur Wood for FolkWax: Musically speaking, what came first for you, wanting to play an instrument or write a song?
Karla Bonoff: Definitely learning to play an instrument. As a kid I tried different instruments. I played violin, clarinet, and I took piano lessons. When I was about twelve I finally hit on guitar. I was listening to Peter, Paul & Mary and Joan Baez and that coincided with wanting to play guitar.
FW: So it was the early 1960's Folk explosion.
KB: Yeah. I don't know, the guitar appealed to me. I was okay with playing piano, but the whole Classical lessons thing wasn't fun. We had this Russian piano teacher that would come and crack the whip for two hours every week. There was lots of homework and that didn't do it for me. I'm glad in retrospect that I got the technique down when I was seven, eight, and nine because you can always pull it back, which I did. The guitar is really where I first started writing melodies. My sister wrote lyrics and that's sort of the beginning of my career in terms of writing music.
FW: You mentioned taking piano lessons at the age of seven, was that when you began playing the instrument?
KB: I probably began taking Classical music piano lessons at the age of five or six.
FW: Were your parents musical? Is music present in the family gene?
KB: Yeah. Even though he was a physician, my grandfather really loved to play violin. He would liked to have been a Classical violinist, but his parents wanted him to be a doctor so he wasn't able to do that professionally. My mum was a really good Classical pianist - not professional, but she taught. My dad played great Boogie-Woogie piano and my parents listened to music all the time. I grew up hearing Bennie Goodman and Frank Sinatra. We were exposed to a lot of different kinds of music and really encouraged to play instruments, not forced to, but I feel the value of playing an instrument was definitely high in my household.
FW: Was there a school-based programme that you tapped into, as well as having private lessons?
KB: Yes, there was a combination. At school you could join the orchestra. My first memories are of being in a grammar school band where I played clarinet. You had to read the music and play the alto parts. It was really fun.
"For me, writing lyrics
is kind of a Zen process..."
FW: Did the piano lessons end when you picked up the guitar?
KB: Yeah. I think even before that. Every time that Russian piano teacher's car appeared on our driveway, my sister and I would run screaming. It was always a case of "You go first," and "No, you go first." [Laughs]
FW: So you eventually pick up the guitar. I believe that Frank Hamilton became your teacher [Editor's Note: In 1957 Hamilton and Win Stracke (d. 1991) founded the still vibrant Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. Hamilton was also a member of The Weavers 1962/63]. How did that happen? Was it through a family connection?
KB: No. I went to summer camp when I was around eleven or so and I was a junior counselor and my counselor - Alice, I can't remember her surname - she had this guitar. It was the first Martin guitar I ever saw. She opened this case and I saw this Martin guitar and I went "Wow." Just the way it smelled and looked. She had taken guitar lessons from a woman who had taken lessons from Frank. I basically went and found that woman and my very first guitar lessons were in a group with her. Then I got to a point where she said, "I think you're kind of beyond me. You should really go and take lessons from Frank. He teaches in Hollywood." It was kind of a roundabout way that I got to him.
FW: Had a few more years elapsed by the time you got to Frank?
KB: Probably fifteen, sixteen - somewhere in there.
FW: In all, how many years did the guitar lessons last, five or six years?
KB: Yeah. By the time I got to Frank they were less like lessons. For instance, he taught me "The Water Is Wide" and many other great arrangements. My sister and I were beginning to write songs, so we would play them for him. He would write these great second guitar parts for my sister to play with my parts. He was arranging our songs basically, and writing musical parts for us so it was really beyond guitar lessons at that point.
FW: Had your older sister Lisa been taking guitar lessons as well?
KB: Yeah. We went to see Frank together and worked on the songs we were writing.
FW: As a teenager were you an avid reader: novels, poems, and magazines?
KB: No, not at all. I was more into listening to music.
FW: I was wondering where your inspiration for lyric writing came from?
KB: You know, I don't know. That's always been so much harder for me. It was something I had to force myself to do because I wanted to be a songwriter and wanted to write my own songs. It has never come easy to me. It was something I had to pull out of myself somehow. Whereas I have friends who, like you say, read a lot and are always thinking in those terms and write down verses when they come to them. I wish I could be more like that, but my brain doesn't work that way.
FW: During the period from picking up the guitar through to graduating to Frank Hamilton, were there particular recording artists that influenced you?
KB: Coinciding with Frank, Joni Mitchell's first album came out. Lisa and I would sit for hours and try and figure out what tuning she was playing. Frank would figure it out in two seconds. We'd take them into Frank and he'd go, "Oh, it's this." He'd have that "Marcie" tuning in two seconds [Editor's Note: The song appeared on Mitchell's March 1968 debut release, Song To A Seagull]. He was really helping us with that stuff and was just amazing. Lisa and I got into writing a lot of our songs in weird tunings and then we'd go play them to him. So I loved Joni and also James Taylor. When I was in my late teens I witnessed the beginnings of what became the Seventies singer-songwriter movement.
2nd part of PART one to follow